Thursday, October 9, 2025

6:30 PM

Artist Talk by DANAE IO as part of FIELD SCHOOL: The Laboratory for Art and Research at A Tale of A Tub

From October 6–10, the Laboratory for Art and Research at the University of Cologne will take up residence at A Tale of A Tub for their annual field school. Travelling to different countries and contexts each year, the Field School is a week-long program whereby students work on-site to develop projects and undertake workshops with local practictioners.

In view of shrinking funding landscapes and massive austerity measures in the cultural and academic sectors, this year’s focus of the Field School is ‘Infrastructures’. As part of it, the students will explore the pressing question of how infrastructures for artistic practices can be preserved, collectively built or reimagined in the form of workshops, lectures and own artistic-research experiments together with invited artists. They will explore questions such as: Through which formats and spatial strategies does artistic practice create a public sphere? What tensions exist between institutional and self-organised structures? What mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion, and precarisation are at work? Where can spaces of agency or resistance be identified—conceptually, materially or infrastructurally?

As part of the curriculum, Rotterdam-based artist Danae Io will give a public talk about her practice following a private workshop with the students. In connecting to the focus, and through working with moving images, sculpture and text, Io attends to processes and materials that mediate social relations—such as image production, infrastructures, and language. Her practice often takes as a focus the ways histories are narrativised and shaped by intangible means, looking at how power is inscribed into everyday landscapes. From optical devices to bureaucracy and processes of nation-building, her work looks into systems that have their roots in modernity and have reshaped the world.