[exhibition booklet] his is Fiction Practice, a laboratory of expanded curatorship to imagine new relationships between objects and ideas. Here we will design other worlds, bring impossibilities to life, remix histories and artifacts, disclose parallel dimensions, invent critical fabulations, model ontological oddities. In short, we will stretch our imaginations to enact possibilities, prototype the otherworldly and think about how reality can change. In opposition to what could be termed a ‘clean’ fiction, practised on the drawing boards of design studios, the simulated atmospheres of computer renders or the secluded environments of production studios, this lab celebrates fictional exercises that take place in the three-dimensional reality of the exhibition space and its visitors. It asks, how can an exhibition enact a fiction? To what extent can it actualise possibilities by making them real for a period of time? Through speculative design, Afro-surrealism, critical fabulations and re-edited pedagogies, key thinkers and curators of contemporary design will explore the radical potential of fiction as a tool for social change. The laboratory is composed of four workshops, each with a different character and enacting a fictional institution — an archive, an assembly, a committee and a school. During the workshop each of these fictional institutions will come to life, transforming into four installations that will open to public as a collective exhibition. You can be part of Fiction Practice by registering to take part in one of the workshops. — workshop 1 | 23–27 September 2019 [exhibition 28 September] ASSEMBLY FOR THE EXTRA REAL By Malique Mohamud and Marina Otero Verzier, with Ibiye Camp Welcome to the weird, the sheer bizarre, the extraordinary. To the otherworldly. We invite you to imagine something more than what is right in front of you; to design another world next to this one. Unfolding through the lens of Afro-Surrealism, this parallel dimension will mobilize and remix oral histories, displaced artifacts, circulating images and beats to comment on identity, power and forms of representation within the space of the exhibition, the cultural institution, and beyond. A re-enactment of the historic room where The Berlin Conference (1884–85) was convened will serve as our headquarters. The room, one of the stages where the so-called Scramble for Africa formalized, and the absurdity of its history, are now available to be re-appropriated and countered. Inside, disguised as curators, we will engage in the design and practice of research, transmedia narratives, and forms of activism. Armed with diasporic imaginations, our aim is no other than creating a committee for the scramble for our collective present, starting from the territory of Europe. LEADERS Malique Mohamud is a writer and designer who developed an interest in the relationship between urbanity and street culture in his youth, when he stole tapes by Wu-Tang, Tupac and Outkast from his brother’s room. The son of a Somali poet and a general, he looks for meaning in cultural production through an Afro-diasporic lens. Autonomy, subversiveness and (skewed) power relations are recurring themes in his work. He is the founder of the art and research collective Concrete Blossom and every now and then writes for Dutch mainstream media platform The Correspondent. Marina Otero Verzier is director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut and member of the Artistic Team for Manifesta 13. Recently, she curated the exhibition “Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective by Jonas Staal” (2018), and co-curated I See That I See What You Don’t See at La Triennale Di Milano (2019). Previously, Otero was the curator of Work, Body, Leisure, the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, and co-curator of  the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. She edited books such as After Belonging (2016), and Work, Body, Leisure (2018) and teaches at RCA in London. Ibiye Camp is an artist and designer who’s practice explores identity and landscape. Camp works between the UK and West Africa using cross-disciplinary methods of painting, textiles, performance, and film. Camp has an ongoing series of painted clothing called Such A Fan. It is inspired by 90s nostalgia, and hip-hop music videos, that celebrate women of colour. The series Such A Fan was shown in a performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum with Gal-Dem in 2016. INFORMATION Primarily in English. Max.6/8 participants. For curators, journalists, designers, researchers, writers, non formally trained critics and practitioners; curious minds are welcome to participate. Material requirements: laptop, sketching material and video camera (if possible). Free workshop; required registration [fee 35 €].   — workshop 2 | 23–27 September 2019 [exhibition 28 September] AN ARCHIVE OF IMPOSSIBLE OBJECTS By Dunne & Raby The Archive of Impossible Objects is a platform for exploring other systems of reality that stretch our imaginations in ways that not only help us imagine how things could be otherwise, but also, how the way we think about reality might change. Impossible in this context means within our own narrow sense of what we deem real, or unreal. There are other ‘reals’ that allow very different possibilities to exist — literature, the edges of science, nonwestern cultures and ontologies, and philosophy. As for objects, here we are thinking more about models than products or prototypes. Models as ideas made concrete, physical proxies for other realities, impossibilia, abstracta and ontological oddities. The workshop will provide a space to discuss, share and explore ideas along these lines and to think about how such a space might exist in a society, what it might contain, and how it is made accessible to different publics. During the workshop we will develop proposals for new impossible objects that expand the archive. LEADERS Dunne & Raby use design to explore how alternative values, belief systems and ideals can be made tangible through everyday objects in ways that spark reflection on the kind of worlds people wish to live in. Dunne & Raby's work has been exhibited at the MoMA in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the Design Museum in London, and is in several permanent collections including MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts.  INFORMATION Primarily in English. Max.6/8 participants. For professional or student curators, journalists, designers, social scientists, physicists, historians, philosophers, or writers; curious minds are welcome to participate. Material requirements: laptop and notebook. Free workshop; required registration [fee 35 €].   — workshop 3 | 23–27 September 2019 [exhibition 28 September] THE ETHICS COMMITTEE OF DARK CONSERVATION By Dani Admiss and Gillian Russell With Professor Ana Sofia Carvalho The Ethics Committee of Dark Conservation is a fictional bureau dedicated to reimagining ways of curating on a planet threatened by global warming. Through critical fabulation and speculative storytelling we will build a new and expanded code of ethics for curatorial practice against an earthly-bound backdrop of environmental crises, genetic engineering and uncertain nature/culture divides. Genetic engineering processes like CRISPR have allowed scientists to edit and replicate the genetic code of living organisms. Animals with edited genes will soon be introduced into the wild as a way to eradicate pests and disease and can make species resilient to extreme climates. When genes can be switched on and off, what can and should be passed on? On an ethical level, curating and conservation are concerned with what we preserve for future generations. Conservationists “curate” ecological worlds and curators protect knowledge for societies yet to come. In this workshop you will consider the ethical questions that emerge from scientific developments in wildlife conservation and imaginatively experiment how they have potential to radically change the practice of curating. LEADERS Dani Admiss is a curator and researcher operating across the interlinking fields of art, design, technology, and science. Her approach is framed by ideas and practices of worlding and world-making, using these as lenses to explore alternative forms of curatorial and social practice imagined and pursued. She is particularly interested in the entanglements that materialise from extensive mapping technologies and her projects blur the lines between those doing the research and those being researched. Gillian Russell is a design anthropologist whose projects centre on the interplay between design and its critical contexts. Professor Ana Sofia Carvalho is the director of the Bioethics Institute of the Portuguese Catholic University. She has a solid scientific course, with research ranging from biotechnology to ethical issues of health and scientific integrity. INFORMATION Primarily in English. Max.6/8 participants. For professional or student curators, designers, researchers, social scientists, geographers, or writers; curious minds are welcome to participate. Material requirements: laptop, notebook and writing material. Free workshop; required registration [fee 35 €]   — workshop 4 | 23–27 September 2019 [exhibition 28 September] DESIGN AS LEARNING— RE-EDIT By Jan Boelen and Vera Sacchetti Why do design? What is design for? These are forward-looking questions for a creative discipline that seems more slippery to define than ever. In a world of dwindling natural resources, exhausted social and political systems, and an overload of information there are many urgent reasons to reimagine the design discipline, and there is a growing need to look at design education. Learning and unlearning should become part of an on-going educational practice. We need new proposals for how to organise society, how to structure our governments, how to live with, not against, the planet, how to sift fact from fiction, how to relate to each other, and frankly, how to simply survive. This workshop will take as a starting point the Design As Learning: A School of Schools Reader publication, produced on the occasion of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, A School of Schools. Through a series of group readings, discussions and site visits, we will look at design education from a wide variety of angles, from its power structures to the spaces where it takes place, and consider how various alternative pedagogical models have been implemented throughout time. These readings, visits and reflections will be re-thought, re-hashed and re-edited to form new reflections and alternative pathways for design, education and design education.  LEADERS Jan Boelen is artistic director of Z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium, artistic director of Atelier LUMA, an experimental laboratory for design in Arles, France, and curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (22 Sep–4 Nov 2018) in Istanbul, Turkey. He also holds the position of the head of the Master department Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Vera Sacchetti is a design critic and curator. She serves in a variety of curatorial, research and editorial roles. She is co-founder of the editorial consultancy Superscript and integrates the curatorial initiative Foreign Legion. She was an associate curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial and curatorial advisor for the Biennial of Design in Ljubljana. Her writing has appeared in Disegno, Metropolis, and The Avery Review, among others. INFORMATION Primarily in English. Max.6/8 participants. For designers, writers, critics, curators, multidisciplinary participants; curious minds are welcome to participate. Material requirements: laptop, notebook and writing material. Free workshop; required registration [fee 35 €]   — PLACE Quinta de Santiago, Matosinhos [map] — POSTER [download] — PARTICIPANT PACK [download]