Workshop: Assembly for the Extra RealWorkshop: Assembly for the Extra Real

Welcome to the weird, the sheer bizarre, the extraordinary. To the otherworldly. We invite you to imagine something more than what is right in front of you; to design another world next to this one.

Unfolding through the lens of Afro-Surrealism, this parallel dimension will mobilize and remix oral histories, displaced artifacts, circulating images and beats to comment on identity, power and forms of representation within the space of the exhibition, the cultural institution, and beyond. A re-enactment of the historic room where The Berlin Conference (1884-85) was convened will serve as our headquarters. The room, one of the stages where the so-called Scramble for Africa formalized, and the absurdity of its history, are now available to be re-appropriated and countered. Inside, disguised as curators, we will engage in the design and practice of research, transmedia narratives, and forms of activism. Armed with diasporic imaginations, our aim is no other than creating a committee for the scramble for our collective present, starting from the territory of Europe.

The workshop will be held primarily in English and allows maximum of 6 to 8 participants. The workshop is targeted at curators, journalists, designers, researchers, writers, non formally trained critics and practitioners; curious minds are welcome to participate. Material requirements: laptop, sketching material and video camera (if possible). Registration deadline is 30 June 2019. Find more information on the registration here.

Malique Mohamud is a writer and designer who developed an interest in the relationship between urbanity and street culture in his youth, when he stole tapes by Wu-Tang, Tupac and Outkast from his brother's room. The son of a Somali poet and a general, he looks for meaning in cultural production through an Afro-diasporic lens. Autonomy, subversiveness and (skewed) power relations are recurring themes in his work. He is the founder of the art and research collective Concrete Blossom and every now and then writes for Dutch mainstream media platform _The Correspondent. _Malique is a 2018 Het Nieuwe Instituut Research Fellow. His research project, _The Bodega aka Avondwinkel as a site of archival practices_, hopes to articulate the emergence of a diasporic esthetic situated in Rotterdam by means of a Bodega.

Marina Otero Verzier is director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut and member of the Artistic Team for Manifesta 13. Recently, she curated the exhibition /"Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective by Jonas Staal/" (2018), and co-curated I See That I See What You Don't See at La Triennale Di Milano (2019). Previously, Otero was the curator of Work, Body, Leisure, the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, and co-curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. She edited books such as After Belonging (2016), and Work, Body, Leisure (2018) and teaches at RCA in London.

Find more information on Fiction Practice Fiction Practice - Curators Lab at the Porto Design Biennale website.