• ◯ Intro

Infos

Intro

The talk by the WERKER—Rogier Delfos and Marc Roig Blesa—about their artistic practice is being held as part of the FIELD SCHOOL: GRAZ project week, which is hosted by the Laboratory for Art and Research at the University of Cologne and is headed by Karina Nimmerfall. Also involved in this cooperation is the IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art at the Graz University of Technology. Furthermore, this conversation is also connected to the still current issue Camera Austria International no. 163, in which WERKER has realized a twelfe-page text and image contribution entitled “AMATOR ARCHIVES: ON QUEER REPRODUCTION.”

WERKER operates at the intersection of labor, ecofeminism, and the LGBTQIA+ movements, advocating for an image critique of daily life to analyze what becomes visible and what remains hidden or silenced in different political contexts. The art collective, initiated by Rogier Delfos and Marc Roig Blesa in Amsterdam in 2009, released ten issues of a publication called WERKER MAGAZINE. Since then, the WERKER collective has explored a variety of media, including installation, performance, video, sound, textile, and digital publishing. It has also developed community projects such as reading groups, cine-clubs, radio podcasts, and publishing workshops.
Taking inspiration from the Association of German Worker Photographers (VdAFD), a group of politicized photography clubs that emerged in the 1920s, WER­KER follows in the footsteps of the first socialist photographic experiments in the USSR, which extended to Europe, the United States, and Japan. Their methods revolved around self-representation, self-publishing, image analysis, collective authorship, and counter-archiving.

FIELD SCHOOL: GRAZ – Forget Photography? The Library Project

Libraries are not passive, value-neutral places where knowledge is collected and made accessible, but active places where discourses are negotiated, contested, and confirmed. Starting from questions about the current role of photography in art and society, FIELD SCHOOL: GRAZ engages with the library’s epistemological processes and knowledge, together with invited artists, curators, and experts. Taken up here, through workshops, lectures, and one’s own research-based artistic experiments, is Andrew Dewdney’s demand to forget photography as a strategy for reflecting on new approaches to organizing knowledge about the visual in the context of culture: How do processes of selection, evaluation, and ordering, as well as search and research, take shape? What (and whose) history of photography is being told? How can gaps be made visible? How does the library become a place of intervention and radical storytelling?

With contributions by Reinhard Braun, Christine Frisinghelli, Dejan Marković, Margit Neuhold, Barbara Petritsch, Nicole Six / Paul Petritsch, Anna Voswinckel, and WERKER.

In collaboration with the Laboratory for Art and Research at the University of Cologn in the frame of the FIELD SCHOOL: GRAZ and with the IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology.

We are already looking forward to spending the evening together!

The Team of Camera Austria

Partners/Sponsors