Relational Practice

The laboratory brings together up to fifteen (15) participants, two external instructors, and the program’s curator to collectively (re)think photography and its contingent lens-based practices as relational exercises. Over four days, participants engage in a series of relational exercises that depart from their individual projects and experiences and extend toward others and the world. Rather than focusing solely on the representational or figurative meaning of images, these exercises foreground the event of photography: the physical, material, historical, and affective relations, situations, and dynamics that emerge through the production and circulation of images.  In this light, the laboratory proposes a dissolution of “custody” over individual projects, encouraging instead the sharing and shifting of roles, the performance of affective relations, and attentiveness to contextual disparities in the reading and dissemination of images.