This immersive workshop approaches the HEAD – Geneva campus and its surroundings as a performative scene, a space of care, critique, and creation. Inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Maintenance Art Manifesto, it places maintenance – that is, the work of upkeep, repair, and care – at the center of artistic action: sweeping, watering, cleaning, and rearranging become acts that reveal the materiality and fragility of the space.
This daily dimension is enriched by several artistic approaches: that of Michael Asher, whose site-specific interventions question the spatial and institutional context; that of Jerzy Grotowski, whose "poor theatre" inspires an intense, essential practice where the body becomes the primary instrument; and that of Hans Haacke, who connects art to social, political, and ecological systems, revealing invisible flows that traverse the landscape.
At the intersection of these influences, the workshop proposes to explore the landscape both inside and outside the HEAD – Geneva buildings through concrete, critical, and sensitive gestures: poetic maintenance, bodily actions, light interventions, and cartographies of natural or social flows. Each participant-e-x contributes to a collective and processual work that does not aim at producing a final object, but reveals the spaces, situations, and activities of cleaning and campus management as a field of relations and transformations.
The week concludes with an open public performance-exhibition presented in a teaching room in Building D, where gestures of care, critical devices, and bodily presence blend together. This performance-exhibition is accompanied by the creation of a tactile, visual, and sonic journal/catalogue that preserves the traces, narratives, and systems revealed by this shared experience. A way of addressing the results at the scale of the city.
The evaluation is based on participation in the five days of the workshop and on the degree of active engagement of the student.