Erehwon

The Palace hosted Erehwon, a workshop for socio-political intervention in public space on April 8 and 9. Two days focused on design research and development of new open source digital tools, which brought together artistic collectives, activists and individuals. The construction of these online tools aimed at identifying challenges and needs, in a construction of significant communication and collaboration resources complementary to their practices. The result of the prototype developed in Lisbon incorporates the Hackathon, in London, at the end of May.

This Erehwon workshop ended with a radio talk, broadcasted live by stress.fm, highlighting the contents, contexts and needs of the socio-political intervention projects in public space that has been developed in recent years.

The participants were joined by experts from various social and political backgrounds, including António Brito Guterres, Left Hand Rotation a spanish association sharing their experience on the project Museu de los Desplazados, Ogino Knauss/Lorenzo Tripodi and Stefan Apostolou-Hölscher, from the Institute of Theatre Studies of the University of the Ruhr (Bochum, Germany).

With free registration, the candidates had to submit a 500-word text describing the proposed activity adapted to the theme. The applications were open until 20 March. The project is now heading to London and is divided into two parts: on 25 May the working group will deepen the guidelines of the original Lisbon prototype activity, contributing to the improvement of the blueprint design for the prototype to be created at Hackathon. The final prototype will be created on the 28 and 29 of May, funded by Queen Mary University of London and OSSO Cultural Association.