Despacito Art School with Samara Scott/SOSSKYN

16 + 17 + 18 February 2026
10am – 3pm
Open School East

In February guest artist Samara Scott/SOSSKYN returned to OSE to work on an experimental peer-to-peer collaboration between OSE Associates and Despacito Art School. During the multi-day workshop, the group used found objects scavenged from Kent’s coastline to create DIY pencil-cel animations, puppets and sets, focussed on the evolving, liquid terrains of our underwater worlds. Out of initial workshops, water came forward as a method of thinking about the movement of and intersections between human and more than human life, specifically through themes of porosity, spillages and borders. 

During the workshop the group used repurposed waste plastic bags as translucent film frames to create glowing, gloopy, abstract images. DIY and direct to surface, these frames were made using alternative negative etching, pencil cel animation, manual “burns” and long exposures of materials on surface. Rather than using traditional materials, the group worked with everyday and household products such as hair gel and food dye. These fluid surfaces relate to a wider body of ‘viscous compositions’ made by Samara that she calls ‘soups’ and ‘broths. 

Work made by Despacito was edited by Samara into a new stop-motion animation titled Visages and a series of lightboxes titled Ghosts (documentation) (2026), both of which were exhibited as part of OSE’s Summer Exhibition 2026 For Ways Below.

This peer-to-peer project with Despacito formed part of the Associates Programme Social Practice Module, which explores and unpacks what it means to be working collaboratively with communities, and provides practical, artist-led training in the methods of social practice art. 

Workshops were supported by 1-1 Support Facilitators Detchema Baptiste and Lily Dent, and Community Support Facilitator Vlasta Hozova. Special thanks to Associates Peter McKenna and Serena Mirambeau Brey for their additional support.

Samara Scott (b. 1986, London) lives and works in Dover. Liquidity defines her work as objects and substances pop, collide, bubble, and leak, producing seductive and grotesque vistas. Her works are sometimes shown pooled in iridescent outdoor fountains, cut into the floors of galleries, swimming on gleaming glass windows, or stretched into vast suspended ceilings. Foraged trash and supermarket-shelf miscellany come together in spontaneous petri dish–like tableaux. Surroundings curdle and a primal-plastic alchemy oozes onto and pollutes surface.

She has exhibited work at The Hayward Gallery, London; The New Museum, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others. She has had solo exhibitions at KM21, The Hague; Tramway, Glasgow; and CAPC Museum, Bordeaux.

Scott launched clothing label sos.skyn ”Custom Liquidity, Latex atelier” in 2018.

This workshop is part of Open School East’s 2024-26 thematic cycle Home is where the garden is –  find out more here: openschooleast.org/home-is