Who are you in relation to your work?

Photographers are very good in the images they make, but often lack the ability to communicate about them and themselves as creatives/artists. In this workshop, Erik Kessels will push the participants to communicate more clearly about themselves and improve their personality in their work. Being the author or the promoter of your work are two completely different skills.

Kessels will prepare the participants for their possibilities and obstructions they will face in their creative professional career. Participants work on several tasks to get to know more about their own personality.

“This workshop is dedicated to the accidental art of mistakes. In our perfection-obsessed culture we shy away from errors, and that’s a piyt. Um. Pity.”   

We live in an age where most of our tools we use are close to perfection. Our computers, phones, applications and navigation systems make no mistakes. Perfection is not a really good starting point to create new ideas, so to sometimes deliberately go towards a mistake and from their find a new direction is actually something good. Society teaches us to avoid mistakes, but for creative people and innovators they are essential.

How can mistakes inspire you and how can you make works out of it. In a workshop Kessels will force student to fail and fuck up and make works out of this.

“Embarrassment is important. If you’re not willing to humiliate yourself, make mistakes and downright fuck-up, you should consider working in a cubicle farm. It’s safer there.  Because as a creative, you’ll be called an idiot at least once a day. That’s okay. Making mistakes and risking embarrassment, even failure, is how you progress. Without it, you’ll be stuck in the same old safe zone: not embarrassed, but not better either. In other words: boring.  So if we want to do this thing we love, make stuff, we have to get over our need not to look stupid.”

In this workshop and work presentation Erik Kessels will stretch the abilities of the workshop participants to the limit. By embarrassing themselves they are able to tell a personal, often embarrassing and risky story. They go into a subject area of art and photography that they normally don’t dare to touch.