Extra Practice's (poetic) Pool Tool kit

Extra Practice is a shared studio based in Rotterdam that has been prototyping support structures for freelance cultural workers for the past 5 years. In their overhanging project of ‘Pools for Conviviality’ (echoing the dual meaning between economic pooling among freelancers and the swimming pool, the sea, where the latter must swim and survive), XP aims towards making their collective practice sustainable for freelancers. One subgoal is developing formats of sharing their lessons with post graduation students, those new to the ocean of freelance cultural work.

A kit for those post-grad students would be the first format and the starting point for other possibilities. A first kit that would unveil the pinpoints of a substainable freelance environment through metaphorical representations, before making a more concrete and practical one for students. A kit aware of its biases, constructions, and limits, situated in Northern-Europe made by Nothern European and made in mind of currents needs of Northern European design and art students. The purpose of this kit would also be to bring to the forefront of discussions within artistic educational institutions the topics of steady work streams, stability through collectivity, and conviviality, as a driver of meaning and as a translator of intentionality. But this kit is mostly made to help students escape their fear of drowning and help them see towards which aims they should be sailing.

This kit does not create new physical tools for post-grads but creates objects that metonymize the different aims that those tools should attain. If tools are usually seen as objects, or things, these ones aim to look more like processes. Built from scraps and pieces of royalty-free images on the net, cut and reassembled, I'm using the same processes as an average, basic, design student. These tools are a mix of real, easy, handmade possibilities, and unrealistic and imaginary ones. Practical as an object but also useless as it is. Poetic tools, that mix the reality of post-grads fears and desires, with the handmade, low-tech, low-scale imaginary that we bathe in, in art and design schools. So yes, it is also for staying warm in our school's esthetical imaginaries, while we slowly drift, or sail, or swim away, to our own practice.