Pedagogical tools from the FOTODOK trip to FotoFestiwal Łódź
Decluttering
While I opened my laptop today to work on this text, I received a third warning from my laptop’s operational system: my drive is almost full and I need to re-organise my maps and delete a lot of files. Decluttering is not something that comes easy to me: I am more the type of person who collects and holds onto things. I look at the desk my laptop rests on, I look at the room in which I am writing. I am surrounded by posters, postcards, and post-its on which I jotted some words, which have partially faded over time. I like to hold on to these objects others would consider clutter. They remind me of places I visited in the past where I met people with whom I shared a commitment to collective learning.
Claire Tio at FotoFestiwal Łódź 2025.
think-do-make otherwise
In my research, I am interested in spaces which try to think-do-make otherwise: spaces that create modes of encounter for difference, spaces that privilege situated and relational ways of knowing over expert authority. I seek out such spaces, near and far, in the hope of bringing home not just physical objects but also different techniques, practices and resources that can help me create possibilities for change at the institutions I teach at. This text shares the souvenirs I carried home from FotoFestiwal Łódź 2025, which I attended with FOTODOK’s Talent Embassy as a guest researcher.
Souvenirs
I was invited to join this trip by a colleague and friend with whom I have been collaborating on workshops and a publication concerning spaces for decolonial, feminist and artistic knowledge-creation in the context of university education. She saw a resonance between the work we have been doing and the approach FOTODOK and the FotoFestiwal organisation take to support and celebrate meaningful artistic work and to build community. The purpose of this text is to highlight some of the approaches to collective learning I encountered during our visit to the photography festival; the souvenirs of study I brought home.
Lea Novi’s ongoing project “Somewhere Else is Closer than You Think” focuses on the ecological transformation of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze.
Unsettle the protocol
“We put on some music and jump together for five minutes. Of course, everyone is a bit nervous. This is an exciting moment, and for some perhaps an unusual setting. There is no better remedy than moving together. So let’s generate some heat, let’s shake of the nerves. Ready? Go.” – introduction to the fotomatch event at FotoFestiwal, Łódź 2025
On Friday, June 13 2025, I attended my first event of the FotoFestiwal Łódź: the photomatch. Although I did not have any clear expectations, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the host decided to begin the day by inviting all participating photographers, curators and publishers to jump together on stage. It was a fun icebreaker, but it also set the tone for the festival in quite an important way: besides soothing the nerves of the invited speakers, the collective jumping exercise made apparent the organisers’ intention to unsettle the usual protocols of professional exchange. The power differentials between those seeking publication of their work and those who are in a position to provide it were, at least momentarily, shaken loose.
[…] learning from each other and promoting and fortifying meaningful connections between authors and experts.
Stifling structures of protocol
The overall approach to the photomatch carried this more playful spirit: reviewers and reviewees could match with each other in a Tinder-like swiping style. In an interview of the PhMuseum, FotoFestiwal organisers Krysztof Candrowicz and Mafalda Ruão share why they moved away from the structure of the traditional portfolio review. Krysztof: ”We decided to remove all the unpleasant and formal aspects and create a format that mainly addresses the things we love about portfolio reviews eg. learning from each other and promoting and fortifying meaningful connections between authors and experts”. I read this act of removal as an act of refusal. Though our initial associations with the word might tell us otherwise, refusal is above all an act of affirmation rather than negation (Harney & Moten, 2013). The idiom “one door closes, another one opens” is perhaps a bit simplistic, but it strikes the chord. When the stifling structures of protocol are taken down, there is more room for improvised sociality. When bodies jump together they refuse the seriousness, stillness and frontality common in settings like these, and opt for playfulness and movement instead.
Xaveer May’s project “Odo Onoribo”, Xaveer investigates the poetic weight of Surinamese proverbs—known as odo’—and the cultural values they carry.
Study in the break
Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering (…) The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. – Fred Moten in An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis, 2013, p. 110.
The programme offered inspiring talks, exhibition openings and film screenings, yet what stayed with me was the sense that these scheduled activities were not the only (or most important) part of what made the festival matter. What made the festival matter, to me, were the improvised breakfasts the FOTODOK team shared each morning in one of our hotel rooms, where we made game-plans and cheered each other on as we prepared to introduce ourselves to curators and publishers. Just as much, it was the moments outside in the sun during the breaks, the dinner parties and evening drinks, where people introduced friends and colleagues across circles; talked about photography (of course) but also about their favorite dishes from home; shared their extensive or humble knowledge about the architecture and history of the city; expressed their grief and outrage about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the current state of worldpolitics.
Olha Vorobiova’s project “Crimea” reflects on the disorientation she felt after the annexation of her homeland—raising questions around identity, belonging, and what remains when the idea of home is fractured.
[…] study is what happens in the breaks.
According to Harney and Moten (2013) study is what happens in the breaks. The break is conventionally thought of as the temporal passage from one productive activity to another, during which ‘nothing really happens’. They, however, give it a different status, resignifying it as precisely the moment when the real work happens. Anyone who has ever attended an academic conference knows that the most inspiring conversations do not take place within panels or the Q&A session, but at the end of the day at the dinner table. In the break, intellectuality emerges in the midst of everyday togetherness. Though I lack a reference point to other photography festivals, I got the sense that the programme was purposefully unpacked (I checked this of course with my FOTODOK companions who regularly attend festivals and they affirmed my assumption). The blanks on the festival schedule signalled possibilities of encounter, and opportunities to study together.
Embrace amateurism
What are these pressures today? And how do they fit what I have been calling professionalism? (…) Despite their pervasiveness, each of them can be countered by what I shall call amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession. – Edward Said in Representations of the Intellectual, 1996, p. 76
Over the course of the photography festival I had many long conversations with people from our FOTODOK Talent Embassy group. Asking how they experienced it, they all responded by stating how much they appreciated the open and caring atmosphere during the festival and the support they received from one another. Most of the talents we brought to Łódź are still at the early stages of their professional careers; for some, it was their very first time at a photography festival of this scale, the first time they found themselves in a setting where their work could be seen by people who could open new doors for them. To prepare them for what was to come, the Talent Embassy programme has offered them guidance and support: moments of practicing the portfolio review, receiving feedback on their pitches. Of course, the programme facilitated the professionalisation of the photographers, but a particular kind of professionalisation, I would say. One that does not lose sight of the generative force of amateurism.
Alina Lupu’s work centers on the role of images and performance within protest, reflecting on how photography and storytelling can document, shape, and actively take part in movements for change.
A position of vulnerability
To give an example of the professionalism-amateurism symbiosis: a few weeks before our departure to Łódź, I was invited to be one of the reviewers during the practice portfolio review sessions. I explained to the reviewees that I did not have a background in photography and felt a bit inapt to evaluate the quality of their work. Yet, as a teacher I am used to guiding students in their research processes and responding to how they articulate the narrative of their work. Both the photographers and I approached the review table from a position of vulnerability. What unfolded were conversations, not so much about the form and aesthetics, but about the urgencies behind their art. What directed them into this and not that pathway? How were they themselves moved by their work? Beautiful conversations about family-lineages, feminism, rituals and stones imbued with spiritual forces. Our coming-together in difference, our being together in shared vulnerability enabled such exchanges of curiosity. Embracing amateurism moved us from unknown territory towards a shared ground.
Echoes from elsewhere
The modes of study I encountered at FotoFestiwal and FOTODOK echoes with other places I visited where collective learning took place. Earlier this year, I visited PAF, a reclaimed monastery in Saint-Ermes where artists, researchers and writers come together to explore the contingent connections between their ways of thinking and doing. Whilst everybody brings their specific expertise, the encounters and collaborations revolve around the limitations of our individual knowledges and a curiosity to learn with and from each other. From PAF, I carried home an appreciation of experimentation and an understanding of failure as generative rather than definitive.
Another place where the rhythms of collective learning resonate with those I found in Łódź is the Buitenplaats Brienenoord in Rotterdam. I regularly visit this community situated on a small island in the river Ijssel consisting of builders, makers, thinkers who organise events and showcase their work. The work that happens there attends closely to the particularities of the island: its rhythms, its life forms, and the issues that arise for their multispecies inhabitants. Whenever I return from the island, my senses appear heightened and I note that I am much more attuned to the rhythms of my body and the environments I find myself in, the polyrhythmics of my everyday.
[…] collective learning rests on an infrastructure of care and interdependency […]
Collective intensity
Both at PAF and at Brienenoord collective learning rests on an infrastructure of care and interdependency: meals are cooked and eaten together, spaces and materials are shared, and time is shaped by the social and cyclical rhythms of collective organising and living. Feminist and decolonial thought remind us that knowledge-creation is not confined to the written page or the spoken word. It is generated through and with the body, through and with other bodies, in moments of collective intensity – jumping, dancing, eating, creating together. Such other ways of knowing that arise from commoning practices – which Harney and Moten (2013) also refer to as ‘study’ – pave the way for imagining and enacting more desirable and just futures.
I see a connection between places like PAF and Brienenoord and the Talent Embassy visit to Fotofestiwal: during our time together in Łódź, I witnessed how both the organisation of the festival as well as the team of FOTODOK were enacting study and commoning through-and-through. In the final part of this text, I would like to reflect on what I brought home from the trip to the FotoFestiwal.
Marie-Louise Hodge, From the archive, my dad in Amsterdam. Marie-Louise is an Amsterdam-based artist and photographer whose work centers on the stories and expressions of Black diaspora communities.
Souvenirs of study
As I stated at the beginning, I entered this trip with the hope of bringing home tools that can help me initiate change at my own institutions, the university and the art academy. These are the souvenirs I carry from my trip to FotoFestiwal with the Talent Embassy, and bring back into my classrooms:
- a class is not a predetermined collective: being in the same room does not automatically create community. If the purpose of a class is study rather than accreditation, we must actively foster the contingent relations between students and teachers. Such a collective is unstable and in flux: students come and go, (power) relations shift, and it may take time to find a modus operandi- if we ever do. What if, in each class, we asked: how else to be together? What if collectivity is not a given or an afterthought, but a continuous question of renegotiation?
- supporting students in their professional development can go hand-in-hand with an attentiveness to the generative force of amateurism. I believe that within our educational institutions we still pay too little attention to this, as the focus is so heavily on specialisation, building CVs, and preparing for the workforce. What if our skill courses would not aim at straight-line aggregation but at diffraction?
- even though schedules are tight and deadlines are looming, breakfast should never be skipped. Because studying begins at the breakfast table and continues during the breaks. What if we stop complaining about having too little time in our classes to do what we supposed to do and instead start to value the excess knowledges created in the time before, after and in-between scheduled activities?
- sometimes we should push the tables and chairs aside and just jump together for a couple minutes. We teachers should bolster up the courage to unsettle protocols. That might sound like a daunting task, but study is not about overthrowing the status-quo from without. Rather, it is about playfully working within existing structures, finding cracks where seeds of resistance can germinate which might eventually transform these very structures.
Re-invention
Although the posters on my walls and the post-its on my desk might indicate otherwise, I’d like to believe that souvenirs are not meant to be kept in one place. They travel with us, and they also get a different meaning and take different shapes when they are taken up in new contexts. What I carried back from Łódź will not stay the same in Rotterdam, but that is precisely the point: study continues through its re-invention. Study always moves, and moves us into ever new directions.
Claire Tio is a PhD-researcher ‘Transformative Academic Education’ at Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. In her research, she focuses on transformative educational and research-practices, which foster – and emerge from – engagement with artistic research, feminist philosophy, philosophy of education and decolonial inquiry. In June 2025 Claire joined five artists and photographers that are part of FOTODOK’s Talent Embassy to FotoFestiwal Łódź 2025.
