Syllabus IV will be at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, over the weekend of 26–29 April. Please note, we have already selected the participants for Syllabus IV.

Syllabus IV artists Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham are visiting Sheffield for their fourth retreat with the themes 'Peripheries, Communities and Ecologies'.

Friday

Friday will begin with artist presentations for three of the Syllabus artists, who will be joined by S1 artists Ashley Holmes and Lea Torp Nielsen, and Bloc Projects curator Dave McLeavy. After lunch, artist Sophie Hope of Manual Labours, will lead  a workshop exploring the concept of the staff room – what does it mean to people and who has access to it? In the evening, the artists will meet for a dinner of Eritrean and Ethiopian food.

Saturday

On Saturday, artist Serena Lee and curator Louise Shelley will lead a full-day workshop imagining futures of language through collective reading, writing and making. In the evening, the artist will be treated to a dinner of South East Asian vegetarian and vegan food.

Sunday

Sunday will begin with four more artist presentations, followed by a sauna session with Warmth roaming sauna. 

Monday

An extra, optional day will include a walk in nearby Edale.

Reading

• Chris Kraus, Social Practices: Lost Properties
• Louise Ashcroft, DIY.DIWO.DIA in Art Monthly issue 424
• Manual Labours Manual #4, Building as Body: Introduction
• Spaces of Commoning, Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday: Introduction

Biographies

Manual Labours is a research project exploring physical and emotional relationships to work, initiated by Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope. This project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual) aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour. Sophie Hope’s practice based research focuses on the relationships between art and society. Sophie has developed practical projects through which to research cultural policy, labour conditions and community art histories. These include a three-year participant-led investigation into socially engaged art and a largescale community performance in a Dutch new town.

Serena Lee layers cinema, performance, voice, image and text to map a political grammar of harmony. Modelling belonging and power through polyphony, she practises and collaborates internationally. Serena is a member of the Read-in research group, a self-organised collective that experiments with the political, material, and physical implications of collective reading and the situatedness of any kind of reading activity. 

Louise Shelley is the current Curatorial Fellow at Cubitt, London. She was previously Projects Curator at The Showroom, London where she coordinated the Communal Knowledge programme, a series of collaborative projects with local and international artists to propose and activate approaches to critical engagement with The Showroom’s social and cultural surroundings. The programme produced work, events and alliances that addressed the role of art operating within and responding to themes including pedagogy, work/labour, feminist legacies, precarity, the dialectic of social re/production, class and gender.