On 17 September, we open the Just Art consortium meeting in Groningen with Practising Disobedient Connections, a workshop facilitated by Frida Paes Leão and David Limaverde, bringing the pedagogical approaches of the Disobedient Art School into the Just Art Consortium.
This is the first encounter the Just Art PhD students have with the wider consortium, and we are starting through trust, curiosity, and collaboration, building playfully, through embodied and reflective practice.
How the session unfolds:
- We open by naming the intentions plainly: building connections instead of networking; creating openness and curiosity; and inviting everyone in without the pressure of “getting it right.”
- From there, an icebreaker called The Default Setting surfaces our assumptions in real time: three scenarios touching on sensitive stereotypes, and a show of hands that reveals how readily we normalise dominant narratives.
- We then introduce Fossil Free Culture NL and the Disobedient Art School through our core pedagogical principles: artistic practice as collective inquiry; imagination as political practice; learning through doing; rehearsal without certainty; artistic disobedience as a way of questioning dominant narratives; and ecological thinking through relationships.
- The heart of the session is a Recognising Epistemologies game, built around the PhD research themes in the room, designed to spark curiosity and connections that carry through the rest of the two-day gathering.
- We close with a Visual Culture Exercise: Confronting Ideologies, in which participants receive a prompt to notice dominant imaginaries in their everyday environment, photograph what they find, and share it in a group that runs throughout the rest of the event. That material becomes part of a collective, reflective evaluation of the consortium’s first gathering and might incorporate the second chapter for the Compost for Wild Weeds.
- By the end, participants will have made real first connections across the consortium, experienced one of the Disobedient Art School’s pedagogical approaches directly, reflected on how assumptions shape encounters and knowledge production, and set in motion a collective practice of noticing that continues well beyond the workshop itself.
The wider context
This workshop opens Meeting the PhDs, the Just Art consortium meeting taking place 17–18 September in Groningen, part of the project Creating Common Grounds for Climate Justice Through Artistic Research.
- Day 1 continues with project updates, PhD introductions, and an evening public roundtable, “What can art do for climate justice?”
- Day 2 brings the consortium together for Into Nature: Haunted by Waters, a guided tour through the wetlands of De Onlanden.
We’re proud to be part of this consortium, and glad it begins, quite literally, with practising disobedient connections.