IXDM Lab Week

Critical Media Lab and HyperWerk are the two Labs of the institute IXDM at HGK Basel. Closely connected to the BA Process Design and MA Transversal Design programs, the labs are spaces of possibility in which experimental, research-based, and collaborative design practices are tested.

With the IXDM Lab Week, we host a joint public programme to bring our communities together, foster new encounters, and share insights into the themes and practices we are currently engaged with.

For this year’s IXDM Lab Week from 3–5 December, HyperWerk is hosting a one-day symposium highlighting their annual theme “Widerständige Handarbeit” (Resistant Handicraft). It brings together creative activists and activist designers to discuss small-scale resistant practices and strategies that are successful primarily thanks to the caring and tedious work of their protagonists. The invited projects and initiatives show how to hack authoritarian institutions, document police violence, make institutions resilient against the shift to the right, re-appropriate colonial archives, or imagine futures for a livable world.

The annual theme was developed by students of the BA Process Design at HyperWerk in a collective process. In response to the current political, social and ecological situation we are asking: How can we work together to build a future worth living?

A series of conversational formats, hosted by CML, will respond to the annual theme of HyperWerk. “There’s always a next day – the mundane labor of infrastructural resistance” will revolve around practices of resistance against repressive technical, political and social systems. With guests including Elias & Yousef Anastas (Radio Alhara/Wonder Cabinet Bethlehem), the Resistant Energies study group (Myriam Aouragh, Karl Moubarak, Femke Snelting, Sofia Boschat-Thorez, Omar Jabary Salamanca) and Dayna Ash, Yasmine Rifaii, Nadim Choufi (Haven for Artists Beirut).

We invite you to join us during three days of lively exchanges and crafting resistances together.