Working Utopias

Over two years we have engaged with different artist-run organizations to ask: How do they organize their work-lives? What influence does their art production have on organising practices, structures and vice versa? And are there possibilities to (re)formulate utopian work-lives based on solidarity, despite conditions of highly individualized work that go beyond the field of art?

We became aware that the ways we relate in work, through work, with work hold the utopian longing that drives everybody involved with it. We thus wanted to end our journey with a sympósion inspired by Plato’s dialogues, who conceptualises a sympósion as a rich and on-going conversation on an agreed topic over food and drinks.
While at Plato’s time, the agreed topic was ‘Eros’, we invited different people to think, eat, talk, drink, discuss on various aspects of the overall theme ‘Work as a Relation’. Participants were askes to think about ‘Work as a Relation’ with regard to their own work-live practices and ways of organising to develop a short contribution to an on-going self-organised conversation over two days.