Cooking Sections, Clay Commons, Amauta Garcia & David Camargo, Gabriella Riccio Dan Thompson (Marine Studios)

Sept 2025 – May 2026
Open School East +Online

As part of the Associates Programme 2025-26, we invited guest artists and practitioners to lead one-off artist workshops or talks that might widen the conversation around civic space, ecology and materiality, and local and national production networks.

Art Occupations and the City as Cultural Common
with Gabriella Riccio
November 2025

Drawing from Art for UBI (Manifesto), Art for Radical Ecologies (Manifesto), and Art Against Toxic Philanthropy, this talk explores artistic occupations and the city as a cultural commons. It considers curating and artistic production as collective gestures and as strategies for resisting colonial narratives, while creating opportunities for solidarity and organization. The discussion will also address how to activate platforms, networks, and alliances that implement practices of commoning in times of global unrest.

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Thanet Histories
with Dan Thompson at Marine Studios
December 2025

A myth is built – understanding a history of movement to and from Margate, why Margate is what it is, its roots, a history of influx and depression, and transient communities.

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Ministry of Sewers
with Cooking Sections
January 2026

Welcome to the UK’s first Ministry of Sewers, a gathering place for swimmers, farmers, schoolchildren, and residents confronting murky tides and failing water systems, opened in Folkestone in 2025. In this session Cooking Sections led a day-long workshop that explored sewers as once-ecological lifelines, and forms of shared testimony, collective complaints, and platforms for civic action to imagine new ways of reimagining the coastal commons.

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Arrullos for Deep Layers of the Earth
Amauta Garcia & David Camargo
February 2026

In this talk Amauta & David shared their long-term research into our relationship with the deep layers of the Earth, which sustain everyday life but remain hidden. They presented three works: Arrullo, a lullaby dedicated to a submarine volcano wounded by natural gas extraction; One Cubic Meter of Gas, an installation that heats the gallery with biogas and asks how much geological time is required to generate a cubic meter of natural gas; and The Heat Prays, the Heat Whispers, a video performance that explores heat as a language of the Earth and the stories that travel with extracted gas.

Gabriella Riccio. Multidisciplinary artist, and curator. With a background in political studies and performance alongside her activity as choreographer and performer. Gabriella is engaged in the defence of cultural rights, in the movement for the commons and self-governed cultural spaces. As a resident member of L’Asilo – Ex Asilo Filangieri she contributed to the development of Cultural Commons and Urban Civic & Collective Use. Gabriella is founding member and co-curator at Institute of Radical Imagination, a collective inviting activists, artists, curators and cultural producers to share knowledge on a continuous basis with the aim of defining and implementing zones of post-capitalism and models of cultural production as processes of social transformation. 

Dan Thompson is an award-wining social artist, writer, and speaker living in Margate. His work is about people and places. He has worked with communities across England, often uncovering layers of immigration and exploring how they are very much part of being British.

Cooking Sections investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. Using site-responsive installations, performances, and video, their practice confronts the overlapping boundaries of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics. Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections uses food as both a lens and a tool to trace the metabolic relations behind industrialised food systems. Since 2015, they have run CLIMAVORE, a long-term, site-responsive project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolise climate breakdown.

The Clay Commons is a growing network hub that allows members to explore the potential of clay studios and practice to build emancipatory futures. Grounded in practical organising and creative education, Clay Commons acknowledges clay as a politicised arena. We aim to work collectively with our community to co-create alternative values within the ceramic discipline, that centre clay, not ceramic. This shift allows us to sit in the generative messiness of clay, and to decouple our understanding of ceramics as solely an art or product based material. Instead, clay becomes the common ground that we all stand on.

Amauta García & David Camargo have exhibited our work in Mexico, the Netherlands, France, Germany, USA, Georgia and Cuba. As a duo, they were artists-in-residence at Jan van Eyck Academie (The Netherlands, 2021-2022), Borderland Residencies (Germany, 2022), Hotel Maria Kapel art residency (The Netherlands, 2023), Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, (Germany, 2024), In situ program- Cité internationale des arts, (Paris, France, 2025).

These sessions are part of OSE’s two-year thematic cycle Home is where the garden is – find more events: openschooleast.org/home-is-associates