Roodkapje is Rotterdam’s local laboratory for
ART X MUSIC X FOOD and everything in between

Delftseplein 39
3013 AA Rotterdam

Visit exhibition
Tue-Sat 12:00 – 17:00

Roodkapje is Rotterdam's local laboratory for
ART X LIVE X FOOD and everything in between

16 November 2023

Workshop: how to counter-map autonomy & self-organization? w/ Iconoclasistas & WdKA Autonomy Lab

A workshop organized by WdKA Autonomy Lab & Roodkapje and open to everyone. Using an older mapping of artist-run spaces in Rotterdam (www.autonomousfabric.org) as our starting point, we will be guided by the Argentinean collective Iconoclasistas to relearn and rethink how to make mappings - and specifically, how to map communities in ways that serve these communities, rethinking what mapping is.


What is the map that we are missing? What are counter-hegemonic ways of mapping? If you're interested in these questions, you're welcome to join us.

Iconoclasistas are participating via teleconferencing. Participation is free!

Iconoclasistas is a duo formed by Julia Risler (PhD in Social Sciences) and Pablo Ares (self-taught graphic artist) in May 2006 and based in Argentinia, which began as a social communication laboratory from which they produce graphics (posters, publications, cartographies, etc.) and urban interventions. At present, its activity unfolds in three dimensions of knowledge and practices: artistic (poetics of production and graphic devices), political (territorial activism and institutional drifts) and academic (critical pedagogies and participatory research). It is part of a dynamic network of affinity and solidarity dispersed in different parts of the world map, participating assiduously in talks, meetings and exhibitions in museums, festivals, symposiums, biennials and congresses both nationally and internationally.

Since 2008 they have been continuously developing collective mapping workshops in different parts of the world, stimulating a critical perception of the territories and enhancing the processes of subjectivation and production of collective meanings. Its methodology arises from the inventiveness and experience acquired from the practice and experimentation in the workshops Over the years it has been broadening and deepening from the diversity of spaces and participants: neighborhoods, museums, academia, activist networks. Thus they were nourished by other influences: situationist psychogeography, critical geographies, Freire's popular pedagogies, Fals Borda's participatory action research, critical and feminist epistemologies, the tradition of assembly and networking practices of social movements, and free culture to disseminate and share knowledge, experiences and resources.

WdKA Autonomy Lab is a research project at Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam that investigates new, ways of understanding and creating autonomy in and beyond the arts, with a focus on self-organized, collective and multidisciplinary practices. In 2018, it created a topical map of artist-run spaces and initiatives in Rotterdam, primarily as orientation for students and teachers. This map has, in the meantime, become historical, and both its mapping approach and criteria of inclusion need to be rethought.