tilde (~) workshop No.01, Gillberga Stenbrott, Öland, 17.07.26

In workshop No.01, participants are invited to reflect on the creative process, both the individual and the collective. The workshop takes as its starting point a reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” with introduction by Donna Haraway.

Le Guins language, shifting between personal, political, and ironically exaggerated, exposes and punctures a culture that places on a pedestal the productive hero spearing a mammoth or penetrating the Universe in a dramatically climaxed storytelling; instead, she demonstrates that the continuous, non-escalating process of gathering and storing in a vessel, a carrier bag, a world, can hold importance, can be an act of resistance, can represent the most human of our actions.

The text gave a safe ground for reflection to the next step of the workshop; a creative process that is on-going rather than bound to a FIN. What are our carrier bags? What does it mean to gather? How can one’s own creative process make room for a sense of community?

Text: Ingrid Segring

Participating artists: Jeanette Gunnarsson, Anna Hammarlund, Therese Norgren, Natali Ringqvist, Ingrid Segring

© Therese Norgren