Workshop «Lạ-hóa bản thể» (Othering the Self)

   Who are you once you strip away the name, the job, the faith, the passport and every other social label? A full day in the library of a Hanoi art space is given over to exactly that question, and not as a discussion but as practice: observation, drawing, mapping, writing and material experiments.

   The session is led by professor Narendra Raghunath, an Indian artist, designer, educator and researcher. He graduated from CEPT University in Ahmedabad, has spent more than two decades teaching contemporary art, design thinking, visual culture and the history of art and architecture, and builds his own practice on long-term field research in the Western Ghats around ecology, material culture and consciousness.

   The method has an English name, Othering the Self. The idea is to step outside the familiar story you tell about yourself and look at it as an insider and an outsider at the same time, noticing how identity keeps being reshaped by memory, place, language, objects, rituals, relationships and collective history. Personal reflection then stops being a diary entry and turns into artistic enquiry.

   The essentials
Group limited to 10 to 12 people
Working methods: observation, dialogue, drawing, mapping, writing, material experiments
Intended for art students, artists and early to mid-career cultural practitioners
Places by advance registration only

   Come if you are already making work and have hit the question of what that work is actually about. A single day will not hand you a finished technique, but it will hand you tools for turning personal material into a project.

   The workshop runs in English and Vietnamese, both languages confirmed by the organisers.

   The venue: HAS Library is the library of Heritage Art Space on the second floor of COMPLEX 01, a former factory in an alley off Tây Sơn. It is a working reading room rather than a lecture hall, which is why a group this size fits it naturally.

   Places are few and admission goes through a form, so if identity and artistic research are what you are working on, it is worth applying early.