Enough Bad Jokes: Collective Joy as an Act of Resistance

About

This workshop explores art as a social practice and tool for micro-resistance. We will look at how jokes, absurdity, and collective imagination can generate clarity and connection, even in oppressive or overwhelming contexts.

In times of social tension, polarization, and global precarity, joy itself can become a radical gesture. "Enough Bad Jokes: Collective Joy as an Act of Resistance" is a transdisciplinary workshop exploring humor, collective laughter, irritations, and play as artistic and political strategies.

To paraphrase author Fatima Ouassak, could this already be enough? As "politics is the possibility of coming together and having the space to do so." (Fatima Ouassak, Piratenökologie, 2024)

Through readings, discussions, performative exercises, and small interventions in public space, we will question what it means to say "enough" — enough fear, enough silence, enough separation — and how humor can become a language of togetherness, defiance, and healing.

Building upon the spirit of our 2025 course "No Utopia: Artivism and Collective Action Today", this workshop continues our exploration of art as a social practice and tool for micro-resistance. We will look at how jokes, absurdity, and collective imagination can generate clarity and connection, even in oppressive or overwhelming contexts.

Participants will engage in small group experiments and create performative works or gestures that embody "enoughness" — not through retreat, but through joyful resistance, as any act of joy takes away space from oppression. Our sessions will include movement-based warm-ups and dialogue circles, we would like to include short reading sessions as well as continue with theoretical inputs and field visits to Berlin-based activist and artistic initiatives that use humor, play, or irony as a method of critique and transformation

Course leader

Dr. Isil Egrikavuk & Silvia Gioberti

Fee info