HEKLER ASSEMBLY - ANTI FEAR

HEKLER ASSEMBLY is a transnational space for art and cultural workers to share, discuss and collectively imagine new ways of instituting based on the principles of self-organizing, community care, critical thinking, political education, distribution of resources, and healing. With alternating hosts, we will be sharing practical, historical, and theoretical knowledge about collaborative, pedagogical, and governing models established in response to shifting regimes, colonial and neoliberal violence. We will question and learn about radical hospitality and conviviality, eco-centered community organizing, instituting, and art practices that showcase the symptoms we need to transform. Most importantly we continue asking what can be the role of arts now and in the future. Assembly is envisioned as an open collaborative process that includes reading groups, conversations with practitioners, and the AntiFear series. 

ANTI FEAR is an evolving collective practice aiming in this time of crisis and change for a space decidedly between cultural/theoretical dialogue and therapeutic discourse. It is envisioned as a space in which we bring privately held fears into community with others' fears to embrace vulnerability and open collective experiments in community-building, trust, and reimagining the commons. This work is explored through poetry, movement/body work, breathing exercises and meditations, readings, lectures and other practices that untie repressive knots and make us feel empowered, imaginative and hopeful. 

This archive holds a set of strategies and methodologies employed in the ANTI FEAR workshops to date, and we hope that it will be used as a cookbook of sorts for gatherings playing with similar concerns - to re-imagine community, the commons and to wake up our collective imagination.

Read more about each session by clicking on images below. Some of the sessions resulted in ZINES which can be downloaded as PDFs.

Assembly organizer: Artist and cultural worker Nataša Prljević. ANTI-FEAR Assembly is organized in collaboration with artist and neurologist Sonja Blum.