P.3 Social Practices Performative Action

Short Description:

This course experiments with radical forms of community building, social action, and commoning. Students will develop experiments with un/learning how to work, study, make, share, circulate, and be, together. They will produce together a collaborative publication and public presentation.

Long Description:

Performative Action explores embodied collective action and community building at the intersection of art, social engagement, and critical pedagogy. The course examines how performative practices can generate social change through alternative forms of protest, conviviality, commoning, and care. Students engage in collective field research processes, learning to deeply listen to their environments and develop performative actions within contexts of their own choosing.

The course combines self-directed fieldwork with teacher-led workshops centered around the (Open) Study Kitchen, a platform for collective study, discussion, hospitality, and shared meals. Throughout the course, participants rotate between roles as researchers, hosts, documentarians, archivists, and publishers. Central themes include commoning and the commons, critical practices of care, performativity, and the politics of documentation, examining how collective practices can challenge hierarchies, redistribute knowledge production, and create spaces for shared responsibility and interdependence.

Drawing from socially engaged art, activist culture, and experimental publishing, the course looks at artistic strategies used within social movements, including public interventions, collective writing, micro-publishing, counter-cartography, banners, and other forms of direct action and world-building. Students are encouraged to develop critical positions on contemporary social issues such as migration, ecocide, gentrification, extractionism, social exclusion, and public memory, while exploring how artistic and design practices can support forms of social justice and collective care.

The final outcome takes the form of a self-organized public event accompanied by a collective publication and individual research portfolio.

Tutors: Clara Balaguer, Shailoh Phillips, Karlijn Souren and Michelle Teran