Ensemble of Skills

Dates: 17.02, 03.03, 17.03, 24.03
14:00 - 16:00
Free of Charge

“We are suggesting an informal approach to cities and settlements: stripping away the need for highly specialized professionals and replacing them with a community of shared skills.” Tamás Kaszás, 2011

The Ensemble is a recurring education programme of De Appel that gathers polyphonic voices, ideas and experiences relating to the main themes of de Appel exhibitions.

Join the 'Ensemble of Skills' that will take place throughout the exhibition SCI FI AGIT PROP by Hungarian artist Tamás Kaszás to investigate what kind of future scenarios we can imagine in the wake of a political, economical, or technological collapse. Kaszás states that we shouldn’t be waiting for these breakdowns to take place, as they are already happening around us on a daily basis.

During four sessions, the Ensemble of Skills will gather knowledge and skills from the past and present to build a future society. We will rethink the economical, political and social aspects of today’s society. Also we will analyze how people perceive the future, and how the future is imagined in politics, literature, movies and graphic design. We will gather ideas on how the participants see their future, based on the sustainability of our daily lives.

The Ensemble will imagine and build new ways to live together. Based on the knowledge and skills from the group we will build functional objects for imminent survival in a technological broken world, ie. structures for public communication, labor or water, food and energy supply. The design of the objects will be developed from newly imagined collective strategies and ways of being.

Saturday 17.02
14:00 - 16:00

During the first session we will analyse the structures Kaszás developed for people to gather and share ideas. What kind of structure brings people together? What kinds of structures create a safe environment to share ideas and knowledge? How will we share these thoughts? How does an environment stimulate dialogue? How can we build a structure into a place that creates a feeling of togetherness? After this brainstorm we will build the imagined structure: this will be the gathering place for the Ensemble of Skills.

“You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974

Saturday 03.03
14:00 – 16:00

The second Ensemble session will be a reading session with texts from the book The Dispossessed of Ursula K. Le Guin. The text will be read within the structure, which we have built the first session. In-between the readings we will cook and discuss the issues of labor, gender, ecology, communication and politics Le Guin addresses in her science-fiction book. This session the group will decide which collective strategies they will develop further during the last two sessions to self-organise, self-provide and co-exist in a technological broken world.

Saturday 17.03
14:00 - 16:00

With the third Ensemble of Skills session we build further on different ways of living together. During this session we will develop a rhythm of sounds to share skills and to stimulate thinking about the notion of sharing. How do people share in our society today? Is their any inequality in sharing? What can we share in a world without our current technological and economical systems? Together with Renas Arif we will make our own sound instruments and formulate answers to the above mentioned questions.

Saturday 24.03
14:00 – 16:00

During our last session of the Ensemble of Skills we will look back to all the knowledge and ideas that we have gathered during the previous sessions. We will connect the collected ideas to the artworks presented at SCI FI AGIT PROP by Tamás Kaszás and we will integrate the ideas into the structure we have build together with the Ensemble of Skills. At the end of the session we will present the outcomes to the public.