Affairs Chapter I – Communal Luxury

Communal Luxury is a three day intensive workshop, which asks the question: what would truly collaborative filmmaking look like? We will draw on Kristin Ross’ book Communal Luxury, an account of the affective texture, revolutionary praxis, and contemporary relevance of the Paris Commune of 1871. Ross describes ‘a worker-led insurrection that lasted seventy-two days and transformed Paris into an autonomous Commune whose social life was recalibrated according to principles of cooperation and association.’

We don’t have 72 days, but rather 72 hours in which we will consider historical examples of horizontal organisation and filmmaking, devise our own filmic strategies, and produce a collaborative film.

WET is a Rotterdam based artist collective consisting of Sophie Bates, Marta Hryniuk, Anna Maria Łuczak, Erika Roux and Nick Thomas. Besides their individual artistic practices, WET programme events, produce workshops and run an online screening and conversation series where they present one moving image work a month, accompanied by a conversation with the artist on their platform wetfilm.org. They also collaborate and assist in the production of each other’s work.

The workshop is part of Affairs, a two-part workshop programme dedicated to the open relationships and loose ends in collective artistic processes. Across two chapters, in July and August 2021, artists, cultural workers and researchers share their practice in a series of cross-genre workshops to explore spaces of collaborative agency, resistance and obligation that arise in exchange with others.

Affairs is a project by anorak, realised in cooperation with HuMBase, Kunstbuero of Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.