International Visitors Programme
For Autonomy Lab, a research project by the Willem de Kooning Academy, a large number of collectives from different parts of the world collaborated remotely throughout 2021: Display / Distribute (Hong Kong), SMRC 8a (Social Movement Resource Center) (Hong Kong), BananSkolen / Banana School (Denmark), Amigas Collective (Colombia), Bureau of Care (Greece), Arahmaiani (Indonesia), and Constant VZW (Brussels).
Workshops were organised with the collectives within this framework in order to explore autonomy in various contexts. They focused on four sub-themes: political autonomy (PA), bodily autonomy (LA), economic autonomy (EA) and technological autonomy (TA). These workshops took place both online and physically.
Autonomy Lab is an artistic research project in the form of a series of workshops, talks and small publications (podcasts and zines), engaging artists from self-organised collectives as researchers and collaborators, with the aim of making their implicit and hidden knowledge of new forms and concepts of autonomy explicit, subject to critical debate among peers, and accessible to a wider audience.