.d.a.s. Online Workshop: coming in 2026
How do we unlearn obedience? How do we practice care without collapsing into comfort, and sustain conflict without losing connection?
Disobedient Methodologies: Learning with Conflict and Care is an online workshop that unfolds over three sessions, each two hours long. The workshop is designed to introduce participants to the Disobedient Art School (.d.a.s.), an evolving project of Fossil Free Culture NL.
Rooted in both artistic practice and activist urgency, .d.a.s. operates as a space for critical reflection, collective learning, and the cultivation of disobedient methodologies that challenge dominant structures of knowledge and power. This workshop invites artists, activists, cultural workers, and learners of all kinds to explore how we can learn and organise differently: through friction, generosity, and creative resistance.
About .d.a.s.
The Disobedient Art School grows from the long-term artistic and activist trajectory of Fossil Free Culture NL, a collective working to erode the fossil industry’s social license and its entanglement with cultural institutions. .d.a.s. extends this work into the field of pedagogy as praxis, exploring how the methods started in the cross of activist campaign and artistic performance can also shape how we learn, teach, and imagine together.
The school is grounded in a constellation of Epistemic, Relational, and Organisational Principles that are still evolving. They are not fixed rules but living coordinates for navigating how we relate, act, and think together. They propose a learning space where artistic creativity and activist agency exist in dynamic tension, where contradiction is not failure but a form of inquiry, and where the act of learning itself becomes a disobedient gesture.
Workshop Structure and Flow
Three online sessions (blocks), spread across several weeks
Block 1: Introducing the Disobedient Art School
We begin with presentations from two collectives working at the intersection of art and activism: Fossil Free Culture NL and The Home of Participation. Each organisation will share their methodologies and organisational strategies. Through these examples, participants encounter different forms of artistic disobedience and participatory practice that intervene in dominant narratives and institutional systems.
The session closes with a collective reflection and an assignment: each participant brings to the next session a small collection of materials: one image, one short text, and one online link, all of them related to an issue of sustainability, ecology, or environmental justice that emotionally affects them. These materials become the seeds for our shared inquiry.
Block 2: From Personal Concern to Collective Themes
In this session, we shift from practice to framing. Facilitators introduce the principles of .d.a.s., situating them within the context of Fossil Free Culture’s wider trajectory of art and activism. Participants are invited into an open conversation, not to adopt these principles, but to challenge and expand them.
We then turn to the Miro board, where participants’ materials are mapped and grouped into shared constellations: five thematic clusters formed through resonance, contradiction, or aesthetic relation. Each cluster becomes a working group that prepares a short collective presentation for the final session, exploring ethical tensions, contradictions, and critical questions connected to their chosen theme.
Block 3: Collective Responses and Disobedient Methods
Each group presents their collaborative work: the questions that surfaced, the contradictions they met, and the creative or activist responses they imagined.
The closing conversation weaves these threads together, paying attention not only to what was produced but how it was produced: the methods, frictions, and care practices that emerged through collaboration.
We conclude with a collective harvesting: identifying practices, gestures, and methods that could enter the evolving toolkit of .d.a.s. These are not conclusions but seeds, provisional, situated, and shaped by the care and conflict we bring into this learning space.
What to Expect
- A collective learning environment where artistic and activist methodologies meet
- A space for critical reflection and emotional honesty
- Engagement with contradictions as material for learning
- Exercises that combine embodied practice, conceptual framing, and collaborative making
- A growing sense of community among practitioners exploring art as infrastructure for social change
Participation:
This workshop is exclusive to ITEM members. No prior knowledge of .d.a.s. or Fossil Free Culture is required. Participation is free but limited to a small group to sustain depth and intimacy in the exchanges.
Practical Details:
When: Three online sessions (2026 dates to be announced)
Time: Each session: 2 hours
Location: Online (Zoom + shared Miro board)
Languages: English
Facilitators: Frida (Fossil Free Culture NL / .d.a.s.) and David Limaverde (Home of Participation / .d.a.s.)
About IETM Green School
The IETM Green School is an initiative of IETM – International network for contemporary performing arts, one of the largest global networks connecting artists, curators, producers, and institutions in the field of live performance. The Green School series offers a collective learning space for arts professionals who wish to engage meaningfully with the environmental, social, and ethical challenges of our time.
After a successful 2023 edition, the 2025/2026 Green School will focus on ecological transition and systemic change in the performing arts, with an emphasis on how cultural practice can model more regenerative, inclusive, and care-centred ways of working.
Across its workshops, labs, and talks, the Green School brings together artists, activists, researchers, and cultural workers to:
- Exchange practices that connect art-making with ecological awareness and social justice;
- Explore the politics and aesthetics of sustainability;
- Rethink artistic production in relation to resource use, travel, institutional responsibility, and collective well-being;
- Build transnational solidarity around the idea that ecological transition must also be a cultural transition.
Our participation in the Green School grows from shared intentions: to challenge extractive models of cultural production, to centre collective learning and mutual accountability, and to foreground art as an agent of transformation rather than illustration.
The collaboration between IETM and .d.a.s. embodies a meeting point between institutional and grassroots efforts, between the infrastructures of the performing arts field and the disobedient, self-organised experiments emerging from activist practice.
Learn more about the Green School and IETM’s broader network here:
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In Closing
Disobedient Methodologies is both a workshop and a rehearsal for a school that refuses obedience to extractive systems of art and knowledge. It is an invitation to think and feel together, to confront contradictions without rushing to harmony, and to imagine how collective learning might itself become a form of resistance.