Survival Toolkit for Intentional Communities
Workshops by Yin Aiwen
An intentional community is a group of people who decide to work or live together by sharing values, goals or ideals, and who formulate a critique of the dominant economic and social structures. The so-called "Survival Kits" are designed to help intentional communities understand and reflect on their status and future potential. Unlike many organisational tools that focus on boosting efficiency and productivity, Survival Kits emphasise the activist nature and the sustained need for warmth and attention of intentional communities, covering a wider range of considerations such as the practice of solidarity and the transformation of individuals and society. The artists and researchers Yin Aiwen and Yiren Zhao have been developing Survival Kits for several years. Each workshop is conceived as a collaborative work-in-progress and offers an opportunity to test and improve these tools.
The workshops are hosted by Celador, Avenue Jeff Lambeaux 23, 1060 Brussels.They usually run from 13:00 to 17:00. The next available sessions will take place on 29.10, 30.10, 22.11, 13.12.24 and 30.01.25. The workshops are free and anonymous. They are aimed at "intentional communities" such as artists' collectives, arts-related activist groups and collaborative art organisations. Each session is dedicated to a single theme or initiative. Please fill in this form to book an appointment.
The development of Survival Toolkit is supported by Framer Framed, the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe and the Creative Industries Fund NL.
Yin Aiwen and Yiren Zhao
Yin Aiwen is an artist, designer, researcher, educator and occasional institutional strategist based in London and Rotterdam. Her work revolves around the idea that "the technological is institutional and the institutional is technological", advocating relationship-centred design as the antidote to an atomistic society. Yiren Zhao is an educator, researcher and community organiser with a MA degree in psychology and a practice in playback theatre. Working together since 2021, the duo created the Live Action Role-Playing game Liquid Dependencies (with Mengyang Zhao), which explores the future of a mutual aid society, as well as the gamification-as-research project Alchemy of Commons, which develop a future ecosystem for socially engaged art and communal practices. Their collaboration strives for individual healing through systematic change, combining system and game design, ethnographic research, liberation psychology and community development to form actionable proposals.
