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.

15:00–17:00Presentation

Each stainless steel letter of wonder cabinet spins above the main facade as weather vanes.

Wonder Cabinet is a space for art production and cultural development in Bethlehem, Palestine, and home to projects like the now infamous community radio station Radio alHara and Sounds of Places, a research and residency project dedicated to the sonic identity of places, launched in Spring 2024 amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the increasingly restrictive annexation practices in the West Bank. Elias & Yousef Anastas, co-founders of Wonder Cabinet, Radio alHara, and the design company Local Industries will join us online from Beirut and walk us through a piece of community infrastructure that simultaneously makes space for resistance and, facing an Israeli settlement that used to be a forest twenty-something years ago, resists through ist pure presence.

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11:00–13:00Research & Study Session

The past walks beside us, whispering its unfinished tales

This study session with Resistant Energies and TITiPI (Miriyam Aouragh, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Karl Moubarak, Sofia Boschat-Thorez, Femke Snelting) examines the shifting infrastructures of resistance and repression that define contemporary Palestine solidarity, focusing on legal frameworks, social and material infrastructures, and social justice archives.

Our discussion explores the social infrastructures that resist imperial forms of governance and institutional repression, mobilizing networks of solidarity and counter-surveillance. The Resistant Energies group developed a postcard pack published by the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI). The postcards compile a year-long investigation into archival visuals of infrastructure and apartheid—from South Africa to Palestine—exploring the material and symbolic energies that sustain resistance. Together we will reflect on these intersecting movements, situating contemporary struggles within longer histories of decolonial resistance, tracing how infrastructures of power are both dismantled and repurposed in the fight for justice.

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15:00–17:00Book Launch

I will always be looking for you!

I Will Always Be Looking For You – A Queer Anthology on Arab Art is a radical 384 page bilingual collection that documents, disrupts, and reimagines queer presence in the Arab world. Curated through years of cross-border collaboration with over 100 contributors, researchers, community outreach, and artistic care, this is the first anthology of its kind, building space for queer Arab art not as a category, but as a method, resistance, and shared memory.

The anthology’s Project Lead and Co-editors Dayna Ash, Yasmine Rifaii & Nadim Choufi will join us for a collaborative lab exploring the networked structures and alternative functions that made this project possible, including especially the work of Haven for Artists, a cultural feminist organization based in Beirut, Lebanon.

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