by Rodney LaTourelle, studio photos by Olivia Noss // Feb. 27, 2026
Our suffering amidst the trash heap of contemporary life often feels sealed and inevitable. As Michael Marder says, our alienation is being alienated. Countering the passive consumption of today’s social, political, ecological and informational debacle, artist and designer Jerszy Seymour proposes a necessarily utopian alternative, grounded in cooperative creativity. His interdisciplinary practice engages the transformative potentials of art, design and activism through instinctual and embodied energies. Describing his work as a continuous workshop, Seymour foregoes the myth of the emancipatory object, instead oriented towards the comprehension, analysis and transformation of sustaining systems and networks that typically remain overlooked.
Reconceived beyond logistics as a playful, “libidinal” frame, Seymour’s notion of the “workshop” prioritizes embodied knowledge and existential production that dissolves familiar distinctions between theory and practice, body and mind, or say, dance and design. A visit to Seymour’s current “studio” is thus an encounter with his syncretic, and ultimately generous, style of reclaiming the means of production through autonomous collaboration.
Located in a former auto repair workshop amidst a partially decayed complex of early 20th century warehouses and facilities at the industrial edge of Neukölln, “Lucky Garage” takes its name from a graffiti tag found on its double-height rolling door. “Lucky” also resonates with Seymour’s earlier project ‘Lucky Larry’s Cosmic Commune’; a working hostel and event space developed for the 10th Saint Etienne Design Biennale and organized around an exchange economy within brightly patterned psychedelic interiors. At Lucky Garage, this ethos has taken on a more materially grounded form.
Encompassing over 350 square meters, Lucky Garage has been tactically renovated to support fabrication alongside lectures, workshops and public events in the context of Seymour’s current meta-project, ‘Mutuogenesis.’ Developed in collaboration with the Schlesiche27 creative youth education program and Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts), together with numerous guest artists, designers and activists, ‘Mutuogenesis’ is a year-long series of workshops, discussions and events grounded in social and ecological justice. The project concludes with an exhibition at the Kunstgewerbemuseum that incorporates many of the tools and artifacts produced at Lucky Garage, extending their use through further workshops staged within the exhibition itself.
Our visit to Lucky Garage came after several months of activity and amidst preparations for the concluding exhibition. What remained were telltale flotsam, leftover objects and colorful prototypes among the material traces of a space continually reconfigured to support collective production. Handmade hollow-core ‘Mutuogenesis’ tables were arranged in an improvised spray-booth ready to be painted. Developed during a seven-week workshop led by Seymour together with Eva-Luise Gent and Louis Bindernagel, the tables were produced with participants* from S27’s ARRIVO training workshop for migrant and displaced youth. Constructed from cheap recycled materials to form a sturdy, lightweight structure, their organic shapes reflect a non-conforming aesthetic autonomy. At once furniture, social infrastructure and metaphor of cultural collaboration, the tables materialize a cooperative learning process while functioning as mobile platforms for gathering.
Nearby lay a series of strange, tool-like objects, made from recycled plastic in various colors. Produced during another workshop led by Seymour along with Bindernagel, discarded beverage bottles were processed through a DIY plastic extrusion machine developed by Bindernagel and Laura Laipple. The resulting ‘Care Tools’—brushes and cleaning devices designed and fabricated from raw material to finished product—playfully materialize the often-hidden labor of maintenance critical to daily life. Like the tables, these objects transformed the process of collective learning into tangible form, in collaboration with further young participants* from S27’s ARRIVO program.
Alongside these workshops, participants developed further practical skills through the co-production of objects such as DIY Bluetooth speakers, a shared workbench and recycled wood stools shaped like a mutation between a snail and a motorcycle seat. Across these projects, ‘Mutuogenesis’ approaches design not only as the production of functional prototypes but as an evolving set of relations linking knowledge, labor and creative social exchange.
The project additionally featured an extensive program of performances and public events that explore a utopian vision of a “planet to come” grounded in social justice, ecological sensitivity and empathetic systems of cooperative production. Activities began in April 2025 with ‘Urloquence,’ a collective scream staged in the newly occupied and unheated garage space. Combining noise and dance workshops, the ritual opening articulated a galvanizing response to the pervasive darkness of the present political moment, just as the despicable injustices of the 47th President of the USA were gaining speed. The event set the tone for a project that treats collective expression as both diagnosis and vision for transformation.
Fueled by the anarchic yet playful energy of this opening ritual, subsequent gatherings fleshed out a “Mutuogenic” vision of the future, focusing on the transformation of everyday infrastructures. ‘Lucky Land Radionica’ brought together representatives of existing cooperatives to discuss concrete examples of mutually advantageous relationships alongside the federating potentials of emerging technologies. Organized in cooperation with Emmanuelle Braga, Shared Visions and other initiatives, the two-day workshop examined ownership structures that produce inequality while speculating on radical models for cooperative economies and collective land use. Braga’s woven carpets, featuring abstract network forms collectively conceived, extended these discussions into the visual domain, while participants also debated the tactical use of Lucky Garage as a nightclub to generate funds for collectively owned land.
At ‘Typography Synthesis,’ facilitated by Eurico Sá Fernandes and Wooryun Song, the often idealized notion of collective design was realized in playful form. Using audio-input controllers, participants generated shapes on screen that gradually formed the letters of a typeface later used as the exhibition identity. This real time process resembled a Ouija-board ritual channeling a collective spirit and allowed ARRIVO participants* to create in unison while dissolving conventional boundaries of authorship.
If the ‘Mutuogenesis’ project is conceived as a living social sculpture, its defining motif is the process of collective creation as a radical strategy to question established modes of consumption and control based on extraction and exploitation. Rather than proposing fixed alternatives, the project prototypes new forms of communal living, learning and production.
This sensibility is put into ritualistic play by Lios_Labs’ ‘Rite for Mutualism,’ a reinterpretation of Anna Halprin’s 1987 open-score choreography ‘Planetary Dance.’ Reimagined as a collective ceremony directed against “genocide, ecocide and patriarchy,” the performance combined live music with trance-like movement and costumes dyed using locally gathered materials. A week of participatory workshops in deep listening, costume-making and rehearsal culminated in a nonverbal choreography oriented toward bodily and territorial healing while affirming the protection of marginal cultures.
While the dialogue between Halprin’s open choreography and creative participation forged a collective formation based on empathy, trust and a sense of transcendence, Nica Roses ensuing performance-workshop ‘Nobody Cares’ pushed communal vulnerability and faith to the next level. Roses, a member of the radical Young Boy Dancing Group, guided participants in a three-day movement workshop exploring care and sexuality. During the final performance, paired participants exchanged intimate mouth massages before performing a reciprocal sequence of striptease and collapse, followed by dressing and carrying their partner to a chair. Consenting audience members were gradually incorporated into the choreography, eventually assisting in dressing and carrying the collapsed performers, transforming voyeurism into shared responsibility.
The concluding workshop at Lucky Garage, Daniel Dewar and Theo Dietz’s ‘Anti-Capitalist Ceramics,’ returned to the politics of production through deliberately labor-intensive craft. Participants created typically mass-produced objects using “inefficient” manual techniques, challenging the logic of industrial efficiency while emphasizing the social value of skilled labor. The workshop distilled the ethos animating ‘Mutuogenesis’: a wild abandon to collaborative processes capable of transforming pain, joy and growth into communal resistance.
Through its overlapping rituals, techniques and structures of production, ‘Mutuogenesis’ expresses the ecstatic complexity of an interdisciplinary approach. Using surrealism, provocation and humor, urgent topics are addressed with unguarded imagination, unraveling the messy intensities necessary for a socio-political future worth fighting for.
At a moment when systemic change is urgently needed yet structurally stymied, Seymour’s engagement with the experimental nature of the workshop itself—defined by the creative processes of trial and error—offers a method of structural mutation that is both representative and real. If art, as James Baldwin suggested, lays bare the questions hidden by the answers, Seymour’s systemic approach further constructs provisional frameworks for the materialization of alternative answers.
The concluding exhibition at the Kunstgewerbemuseum assembles an inhabitable environment from recycled materials alongside workshops that focus on the production of everyday infrastructure, including tools, furniture and, not least, a soundtrack and space to dance. ‘Mutuogenesis’ responds not only to the question of how we live together but how we resist in creative coalition—offering a visionary prototype of collective desire, chromatically intense, imperfect and full of life.
Artist Info
jerszyseymourdesignworkshop.com
instagram.com/jerszyseymourdesignworkshop
Exhibition Info
Kunstgewerbemuseum
Jerszy Seymour: ‘Mutuogenesis’
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Mar. 4; 6–9pm
Exhibition: Mar. 5–May 3, 2026
smb.museum
Matthäikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
*ARRIVO workshop participants:
1. Abdul, Sami, Aboubacar, Aboubakr, Adnan, Ali, Christian, Dimble, Emmanuel, Hans-Jeremie, Harouna, Ibrahim, Halil, Kevin, Khalil, Mahmoud, Makalov, Mostafa, Müslüm, Mustafa, Nihat, Radoan, Sadik, SuphiAdnane, Badr, Hasan, Imran, Julio, Mamadou, Ozan, Ramin, Sidi Ali, Sina, Souleymane
2. Adnane, Badr, Hasan, Imran, Julio, Mamadou, Ozan, Ramin, Sidi Ali, Sina, Souleymane
3. Aryan, Ayman, Brian, Christian Choutedjem, Hamed, Jabaykhil, Jones, Kemmogne, Tindjou, Mohammad, Nouhou, Samer, Siradio, Thierno, Amadou
