Writing as Infrastructure: Draft Mode (20 June–10 July 2025)
Writing as Infrastructure: Workshops for Arts Professionals (12–20 July 2025)
Writing as Infrastructure: Open House (20 July 2025)
‘Writing as Infrastructure: Workshops for Arts Professionals’ (12–20 July 2025) brings together curators, writers, researchers, and cultural workers to explore writing and publishing as expanded practices of ‘making public’—shaping and framing public knowledge and expression, and forging collectivities of different intensities. The programme proposes to attend to the background infrastructure that enables such circulation and relation, from material systems and institutional protocols to affective infrastructures—the felt, often invisible conditions that frame how we collaborate, communicate and sustain collective life.
If ‘making public’ concerns articulation, visibility, and recognition, then infrastructure draws attention to the conditions that make these possible—the assumptions, habits, and exclusions embedded within them. ‘Writing as Infrastructure’ thus gestures toward approaches that examine how writing and publishing operate within, and act upon, broader material, institutional, and social contexts. Revisiting what has been naturalised opens space for critically and artistically re-imagining how such practices could unfold.
Over the course of nine days, participants in the programme will be taking part in site visits, facilitated conversations, and collaborative workshops. They will be joined by invited facilitators from across Asia and beyond, including: Clara Balaguer (Manila/Rotterdam), an unprofessional designer and cultural worker whose projects reimagine publishing, bootlegging, and epi-institutional infrastructures; Display Distribute (Pearl River Delta), a thematic inquiry, distribution service, now and again exhibition space and sometimes shop operated by a roving cast of conceptual shop girls and co-conspirators; Ahmad Makia (Dubai/Sharjah), a writer and editor based in the UAE, whose practice spans publishing, cultural memory, and archival imaginaries—including his role as Head of Publishing at Sharjah Art Foundation; KUNCI Study Forum & Collective (Yogyakarta), an Indonesian group experimenting with vernacular education, radical pedagogy, and collectivist knowledge-making; HG Masters (Hong Kong), an editor and writer whose work tracks artistic production and institutional dynamics across Asia; Nie Xiaoyi (Shanghai), a researcher, writer, and editor who approaches curating and editing as an act of instigating, fermenting ideas, and facilitating discussion; and others working across the expanded sphere of writing and publishing.
The participants of the programme, selected through Open Call, are: Gian Cruz (Manila), Lyra Garcellano (Quezon City), Yuting Huang (Hangzhou), Khairunnisa (Yogyakarta), Florence Lam (Hong Kong), Yang Li (Beijing/London), Jessica Manuel (Manila), Nicole M. Nepomuceno (Hong Kong), Rose Nordin (London), Lk Rigor (Manila), Yubing Tan (Chengdu), Avani Tandon Vieira (Mumbai), Ngo Chun Phoenix Tse (London/Hong Kong), Pramodha Weerasekera (Colombo/Delhi), and Jiwon Yu (Seoul).
Though ‘Writing as Infrastructure: Workshops for Arts Professionals’ is intended only for selected participants, the programme invites broader engagement through two public openings. ‘Writing as Infrastructure: Draft Mode’ (20 June–10 July 2025), a prelude to the workshops, offers a porous entry into the programme’s early questions—gathering references, prompts, and fragments that sketch its preliminary contours. After the closed-door workshops conclude, ‘Writing as Infrastructure: Open House’ (20 July 2025) welcomes the public to a series of performances, conversations, and events that surface resonances from the collective process (more details to be announced in July).
Writing as Infrastructure: Draft Mode
‘Writing as Infrastructure: Draft Mode’ is a participatory prelude to ‘Writing as Infrastructure: Workshops for Arts Professionals’, offering a glimpse into the programme’s emerging lines of inquiry. Taking place before the closed-door workshops begin, this space gathers selected books, references, and fragments that sketch the contours of conversations to come.
Rather than presenting a finished argument or curated display, ‘Draft Mode’ foregrounds early forms—concepts, prompts, and marginalia—that participants may take up, adapt, or discard. The public is invited to engage with these materials, offering an entry point into the collective thinking and experimentation that will unfold throughout the programme.
On selected days, several ‘radical administrators’ of Display Distribute, an artist and publishing collective, will intervene in the Workshops’ ongoing draft as administrators-in-residence, contributing annotations and provoking otherwise resonances that unsettle fixed ideas of knowledge, authorship, and infrastructure.
Spatial Design by Angela Pang Ho Ho.
The Workshops for Arts Professionals is the eighth edition of Para Site’s ongoing programme which aims to nurture peer learning and critical reflection among arts practitioners across the Asia-Pacific and beyond. This edition is curated by Daniel Szehin Ho.
This year’s Workshops for Arts Professionals are generously supported through committed pledges collected from our 2024 Gala and Benefit Auction, for which we sincerely thank our 2024 Gala Benefactors. Additional support for this year’s edition was kindly provided by HART Haus.
Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The content of this exhibition does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
