The activities in the cafeteria will provide a counterbalance to the discussions taking place during the festival on the impact of AI on our understanding. We encourage you to reclaim your sense of agency through manual work and creative play with language.
Embroidery, word collages and basket-weaving will stimulate your attention and imagination as you experiment together and engage directly with the materials.
Michalina Mruczek
‘Create Your Own Prompt’
📅 3 October (Saturday)
🕖 12.00 pm – 1.30 pm
The flat embroidery workshops offer a unique blend of traditional craftsmanship and a modern approach to creativity. You will translate digital inspirations, concepts and visual ideas into physical form. By mastering the key embroidery stitches and working with coloured embroidery floss on an embroidery hoop, you will learn to give shape to your thoughts, transforming fleeting ideas into a tangible, hand-made image. It’s the perfect space for creative experimentation, relaxation and discovering handicrafts in a completely new, contemporary light.
Michalina Mruczek
Artist specialising in contemporary embroidery
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Michalina Mruczek specialises in contemporary embroidery and proves that a needle and thread are the best way to take a break from screens. For years, she has been combining traditional craftsmanship with modern design, transforming an ordinary canvas into a space for creative experimentation and a moment to catch one’s breath. In his workshops, she shows that, in a world of fast-paced algorithms, the most valuable things are taking a moment to slow down, working with your own hands, and the joy of creating something from scratch.
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Siostry plotą
‘The Creative Side of Handicrafts’
📅 3 October (Saturday)
🕖 5.30 pm – 7.00 pm
The more effectively AI supports us in carrying out repetitive tasks, the greater the importance of skills that remain uniquely human: imagination, intuition, mindfulness and the ability to make sense of things. Weave a wicker tray, celebrating the experience of being in the here and now. Working with natural materials requires you to be fully present, to make small decisions, to respond to what is happening in your hands, and to come up with your own solutions. Every hand-woven tray becomes a record of its maker’s individual choices and way of working.
Siostry plotą
Family-run wicker shop and craft workshop
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Siostry plotą is a wickerware shop that has been trading for 30 years in Warsaw’s Praga Północ district. Two sisters – an actress and a graphic designer and art therapist – took over this establishment from their grandfather, carrying on the family tradition and passion, and nurturing their love of handicrafts.
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Clippings in a Thermos Flask (Gosia Konieczna)
‘Take words into your own hands. Workshop on creating collages inspired by the imagination'
📅 4 October (Sunday)
🕖 12.00 pm – 1.30 pm
An hour and a half of great fun with words, with words taking centre stage. During the workshops, you’ll relax, be amazed by your own creativity and rediscover how good it feels to spend time away from screens and algorithm-driven content. You’ll answer these surprising questions better than many a trained language model – you’ll give your imagination free rein and create a few collages of your own, using press cuttings, the power of association and the courage to create.
Clippings in a Thermos Flask – Gosia Konieczna
Collage artist and lover of recycling meanings
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Gosia Konieczna is a lover of the art of words and the recycling of meanings. In the bath drain, she sometimes finds a ‘world’ and steps barefoot into a ‘tangle’. She created collages for, amongst others, the quarterly Przekrój and the monthly Zwierciadło. She collaborates with, amongst others, the magazines Pismo and Notatnik Teatralny.
She runs collage workshops at cultural institutions, libraries and schools – wherever creativity, an open mind and a return to the analogue world, where she feels most at home, are valued.
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