Workshops!

EASA Workshops are the backbone of our summer
events. Explore what is going on in Sheffield below...

WET PATCH (Mary Holmes, Thomas Philips, Isaac Simmonds-Douglas): Gut Level, a queer community and collective based in Sheffield, is preparing to re-open in a new venue, for the fourth time in the collective’s four year history. This workshop, facilitated by Queer Aided Design, will bring together EASA participants, Gut Level members and Queer Spatial Practitioners from across the UK to design and lay the groundwork for a Gut Level garden. A Wet Patch. Occupying the rooftop terrace of their new venue, this wet patch is a declaration of the collective’s hope for enduring access to space in the city and an active resistance to the forceful uprooting that they have faced many times before. Through holding this workshop QAD hopes to create space for us, queer architecture students and space makers, to dream together, to care for space together and to build together. During the two-week workshop we will forage, design and craft a bed that we hope will support Wet Patch’s growth over many delicious summers. Open to both Gut Level members and EASA participants, we hope that this workshop will connect queer architecture students with each other and with queer space makers in the city. We hope to strengthen each other, the roots of Gut Level and creation of queer spaces in Sheffield. We hope to hold and design a space of beauty, theatricality and joy. This workshop is fuelled by hope. Hope is radical.

THIS BOTHY HAS LEGS (Rory Thomas, Andrew Wilson, Katy Hope): Bothy’s are spread all across Scotland, Northern England and Wales, most being concentrated to the Scottish Highlands. They are places for people to stop during walks and wanders of all kind, equipped with only the bare necessities such as places to sleep, a fire place and if you’re lucky a shovel to create your own toilets. There is one most important rule to Bothies, however, you cannot deny another person entry. In a sense the Bothy is a transient space in which people can move freely through, adding or subtracting as they desire, exchanging food, games and stories with one another. Through communal action this project will successfully manoeuvre the essence of Bothy culture into new contexts whether that be the high peaks or dense urban jungle. The workshop will focus on collective activity in the creation of space, looking at the culture of trespass that brought both the Right to Roam and Bothies into existence. The forming of the transient Bothy we propose will require communal action from our participants and the outcome will be an ephemeral space in which we can exchange experiences with one another and any lucky rambler who may be roaming past.

UNDER THE SLAB THERE IS A GARDEN (Dagna Dembiecka, Konstanty Kosma Mikołajczak): We see Sheffield as a city of dynamic past, being shaped by both the workshop and the resistance notions. Today, vanishing of these two values combined with neo-liberal policy caused extreme typologies, which contradicts the idea of the commons. The scale of the problem is impossible to solve under the current system. On the one hand, the city centre is no man’s land (lack of activity), on the other, it is becoming an object of speculation and capital investment (the land has an owner). It is a paradoxical situation in which the heart of the city is physically abandoned and non-physically occupied. So this is the moment when squatting is the only way to reclaim the city. We propose the creation of a toolkit for reclaiming the city centre, and squatting one of the buildings to create a local activity centre which will host various workshop projects. Under the slab there is a garden! is an intervention focused on farming/gardening deeds. It is argued from the ecological (material re-use, de-concrete idea, food production) sociological (local network of common goods, after-work communities), economical (sharing goods, minimise import) and political (long-term strategy of operation) side.

PAC-MONDO (Cecelia Vincent, Beāte Zavadska): You are listening to Radio Pac-Mondo Your hosts today are C and B Today's program tells a story of a nomadic radio station on the move It is called Mondo Radio For now The Night Kitchen is their cosy base It hosts live broadcasting, evenings and residencies The under-represented of local music industry can find their voice here But their home has plans for new inhabitants Volunteers of Mondo Radio prepare to roam the Seven Hills And even beyond Pac-Mondo proposes to gift them a handbook of scenographies for their range of events And to prototype these Then hand over a Pac[k]age for their journeys And how about a collaboration with EASA Radio? And sharing music? And discovering radio as commons?

THE ASSEMBLY OF THE RIVER SHEAF (Ella Prokkola, Siiri Hänninen, Seela Pentikäinen): The workshop examines our relation to the more-than-human world by identifying, mapping and representing the non-human stakeholders of the Sheaf, a buried river flowing under the post-industrial city of Sheffield. How to pay better attention to those, who produce the commons that make our world livable? The workshop is based on research questions, which are both general and site-specific: How to better connect with more-than-human agencies as a designer? Who and what are the materialities, actors, and co-habitants that together create the assemblage we are calling the River Sheaf? And how to make these actors (human and nonhuman) as well as their ways of inhabiting and shaping the urban river visible? “As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action, they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds. (--) Can I show landscape as a protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant?” -Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

HOW TO STEAL THE BUILDING? (Natasha Krymskaya, Sara Gohberg): Have you ever felt an urge to own the entire building? Focusing on the topic of property, we would like to question the term of ownership itself. Via a rather straight-forward but symbolic gesture we propose to steal a house of Sheffield. How come? First of all, find the one you are really keen on… Stealing is a form of appropriation that can be easily put on par with well-known left-radical practices such as anarchist squatting, occupation, expropriation, communal living, etc. For most, such actions aim to destroy accepted norms of property where architecture is just another form, nothing else. But let’s be honest, applying this exaggerated gesture - stealing as a metaphor - we can attract public attention and try to define and shape a new common ground for future generations. Anarchitecture can benefit the field, to the common space perception and understanding of it not as property, but as a valuable common resource. The decision to steal a building - as an entity sentenced to be rooted in one place forever - is deliberate. It aims to draw attention to the perception of an architectural object not only in terms of its ownership and attachment to a specific place or an owner, but to try to capture its volatility and fluidity regarding its influence on professional and cultural contexts. The architectural object is a common value whose importance outweighs selfish possession.

MCMXCIV (1994)(Joonas Parviainen, Anton Kiiski): MCMXCIV (1994) is a workshop about the power of music to bring people and communities together, and even change the legislation while doing so. It circles around the controversial Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which covered collective trespass and nuisance on land and included sections against raves, disruptive trespass, squatters, and unauthorised campers. The legislation was not just about raves, but land usage, helping push the “commoners” off the private owned land. The recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which gives more power to the law enforcement and encompasses restrictions on “unacceptable” protests makes it topical to ponder on the current legislation putting restrictions on communal, non-commercial gatherings and land use. During two weeks we will build our own modular sound system and set out on a quest to push the limits of accepted use of public space through public listening sessions. The sound system, originally an essential part of Jamaican music culture and history, and the contribution of Caribbean musicians and musical styles – reggae, ska, dancehall and dub, to name a few – to the British music scene is profound. Participants will gain knowledge on how to assemble their own speakers while sharing great music with each other throughout the EASA Commons summer school.

TOLOKA (Kate Kukelko, Masha Samagala, Taras Adamovic): Toloka is an experiment of executing a cooperation model that’s common in rural Ukrainian settings within the urban environment of Sheffield. The traditional idea of toloka is volunteering and helping each other out. By working together on a large task in a big group of people, neighbours or members of a community share their time and physical resources to get stuff done quickly. Here we are going to experience together a modern interpretation of toloka. We will offer our individual time and labour as common resources to the communities of Sheffield and EASA. We will document our experiences, mistakes, and discoveries along the way and as a result, we will create a manual that local communities would be able to use if they want to organize similar events in the future. And, as a good old tradition goes, we will finish toloka with a dance party to celebrate the huge success! So it will be fun, enriching and beneficial for everyone!

UNLEARNING REAL LAB (Marina Urosevic) : Description Coming Soon

PROMENOODOLOGY COMMUNITY (Gabriel Ogbonna, Nick Ulrich, Patricio Sota): Common resources involve a constant exchange and balance between taking and contributing. However, we have observed a disengagement of people in transforming and utilizing public spaces, leading to the need for new methods of dealing with our built environment. We are looking for alternative programs based on community participation, which sustain commons through collective management and move beyond mere consumption. Commoning is a continuous dialogue. Food has the power to connect people, define cultures, and encompass a wide range of knowledge. By studying the act of public cooking, we aim to create new opportunities for space reappropriation and collective management that bring people together. Through collaboration with local actors, we will learn from Sheffield's commoners who engage with their communities and enrich common resources through community participation. We will explore and learn from existing communities and observe how collective kitchens can contribute to Sheffield's communities. We plan to produce a handbook that collects our observations to share our experiences with collaborators and enable common access to our learnings.

UNFOLDING STORIES (Stany Babu, Clara Cheung, Gum Cheng Yee Man): Unfolding stories will look at questions of belonging using the subjective narratives of workshop participants. This workshop will unfold the experiences through socially constructed categories such as gender, race, religion, etc to lay visible lived experiences of the subject. The aim is to explore commoning with questions of belonging against the power structures and the discourses that control the identities of those who belong. As the stories unfold, there is an acknowledgement of the various lived experiences in spaces that are being co-created together by different agents. Through this agency, the workshop encourages the participants to reflect on place-making through the occupation of space and encourage belonging through the commons (against privatisation). We will initially ask the participants to navigate two places, encouraging reflective thinking, to understand the dominant discourses that control our experiences of the environment and our relationship, and making of space and our active role in this process. We use the keywords – commoning, occupation, private/public, belonging, place-making, to start a conversation around the spatial understanding of these terms. The participants are then asked to explore them through their lived experiences. The list of keywords can be expanded as the participants start questioning their sense of belonging and the power structures and discourses that dictate their performance of identity in space.

PRIMARY STRUCTURES (Kateřina Krupičková, Martin Zwahlen): The “Primary Structures” is a tool that helps local communities to appropriate a free space. It is a simple intervention that creates the basis for further projects. The structure is flexible and can be expanded or reduced. It is easy to reproduce, so many people can benefit from it. The project becomes a cooperation between people and plants. By analyzing the needs of the plants, new constructions will be designed for this purpose. If the friendship of the people, the plants, and the construction work out, it comes to a symbiosis and is enlivened throughout the year. A community garden is an inclusive space where the land is cultivated. They also serve as health enhancers not only for the body but also for the mind. Community gardens are also a method of changing the built environment in order to promote more open spaces in the face of urbanization. If architects design and develop their columns, why landscape architects can not design their plant structures? Since we understood how the plant cycle functions we mastered it for our needs. We built different structures to grow the plants and get the maximum yield. The Workshop is about rethinking the connection between the people and the use of the plants.

D.I.O. (Jakob D’Herde, Oscar Levy and Sara Dobrijevic): DIO is the next step of I’m/mutable (EASA 1:1 Workshop), which focused on sensory experience, creating audio-olfactory-haptic installations with minimal means. Instead, DIO aims to understand specific needs that emerge from our (temporary?) occupations in Sheffield, and to come up with multi-sensory spatial interventions to meet them. DIO takes responsibility for our common infrastructures: shading installations, collaborations with EASA FM to spread love through music, setting up EASA Forums or the bar/pub. Most of our interventions will manifest their need throughout the event, for we cannot know how EASians will appropriate the spaces around us. DIO will create, augment, or rethink our EASA commons non-destructively, and act within the timeframe of one day. The day after, we start anew. We can’t expect everything, something, or anything from anyone else. We make the EASA Commons. We Do It Ourselves.

DUMB EMANCIPATORY HOUSING: DUMB ARCHITECTURE FOR THE COMMONS (Sebastian Bietenhader, Matthias Moroder): The history of land-politics is a history of constant tensions between privatization and common interests, in which each side proposes their ideal use of land. The private-property examples are so ubiquitous, that parcellated-perimeter-blocks and rows of single-family houses, wrongly appear as the natural state of the urban and suburban. Counter to this there are truly common historical examples, where buildings and land are interconnected and shared. The workshop aims to reclaim the historical forms and aesthetics of common housing by re-reading the architecture of the self-organized settlements of Red Vienna (1919-34). Through this critical re-reading its dumb emancipatory qualities will be maximized like the evidently non-harmonious articulation of its co-living-houses, the interconnected social infrastructure and the generous occupation of space. Thereby we are developing emancipatory housing that is so directly common, so clear and generous that it is dumb. The workshop will consist of a set of formal modelling exercises with clay and painted corrugated-cardboard that are repeated daily, and short inputs by the tutors. The results are collectively discussed daily following the question: “Is the dumbness more or less than in the last result?”. The final outcome will be dumb common multifunctional housing settlements for the suburbs of Sheffield.

EASA ARCHIVE (Dorien Tulp, Angela Krstevska, Ahmet Can Karakadilar, Ourania Agoranou): Addressing the idea that archives aren't merely repositories but also play a significant role in shaping memory, identity, and governance, this workshop aims to inspire the community toward a more participatory archiving process. It emphasises the importance of collaboration, transparency, and accessibility in the curation and use of archival materials, as the Archive is something that can be considered a common in itself, which belongs to and benefits the EASA community. By dictating an experimental storytelling model, it proposes a subjective intertextuality toward the creation of a commoning sense. We imagine the Archive as a thread, and the works of the embroiderers (read: participants), thoroughly constructed from an abundant individual and collective context, as (sub)conscious patterns of familiarity that constitute an interconnected, interlacing, and intertextual cohesion made up of possible conceptual readings regarding, in this instance, the theme of commons and commoning practices. As a rich database of projects related to and stemming from alternative uses of space and possible variations of associative spatial understanding, the Archive furthermore serves as an affirming framework enabling additional development of the theme, by providing insight into such practices.

EASA WASN'T BUILT IN A DAY(Francesca Cassar, Annachiara Squitieri, Angelo Ciccaglione, Lara Ippolito, Pierfrancesco Lisi, Jiaqi Wang): EASA spirit could be defined as an atmosphere of togetherness which creates a strong sense of place in the EASA community. It could be imagined as a large campfire at dusk where everyone is sitting together. Something magical happens when such a large and like-minded group of people gathers from across Europe in a single site and starts living together for days and days. Eating, sleeping, drinking, building, drawing, walking, designing, and performing together in the same place really creates a feeling of being embedded within something larger. Anything you do as an individual resonates throughout the community, but also that the energy emanating from the community will reach you as well. This workshop seeks to explore how to curate EASA spirit and instigate a sense of community, as well as better understand how without fail EASA has happened for the past 42 years out of the sheer will of passionate EASians who wanted to contribute to alternative architectural education, explore new topics and become organisers. Through community activities, forums, discussions and intimate conversations, our workshop aims to foster a greater sense of community during the event, as well as create a resource booklet available for future potential EASA organisers.

P.I.M.P.S (PROTOTYPES OF INTEGRATED MOBILIA FROM PRIVATE STUFF) (Luka Smišek): Sheffield, we want to pimp your junk! The physical outcome will be collective mobilia (movable goods) that will be initially part of the event infrastracture and laterowned and used by its initial donators or/and local comminities. Regardng the non-physical outcome, we will be happy if we could create a kit of methodologies and design processes with a potential to turn it into a field of action. Our material resources would be recovered materials from civil construction industry (plywood, metal, joinery elements, etc.) households (old furniture, shelves,drawers, fabrics), city dumpster rummaging (cardboard, cables, tires) and by-products of other workshops. The main idea is to create functional, movable assemblies with minumum interventions on our initial resourses, using simple DIY methods. The exercise will start without tools, in order for participants to explore and learn about different constructional possibilities , and we will gradually, in order to future proof what we make, use hand or electrical tools. Our virtue is our shrewdness and practical knowledge.

HEDGE FUND (Georgina Bowman, Hannah-Lily Lanyon): "Hedge Fund" is a reframing of the English hedgerows as a productive commons. We will explore this through mapping, coppicing and making goods from their materials which we will trade at a market in Sheffield. The purpose of this journey is to see the commons as a framework for operating in and which can be practiced in other circumstances. Similar to the way that hedgerows exist at the edges of what's public and private, our intention is to understand the act of commoning at its edges, creating a sense for how other ways of managing, utilizing and exchanging goods which make up our daily lives can have a place in the world.

BRICKS OF OLD AND NEW: Description Coming Soon