Demotic Ritual Practices: What Do You Reckon?


This is a participatory workshop that explores how everyday activities can be codified into our organizing practices.

​What do you reckon? This is a participatory workshop that asks us to imagine interacting with one another outside of hegemonic narratives. References to ritual in architecture may often be informed by spirituality, cultist and alternative lifestyles, expressions and appropriations of indigeneity, or the corporate grindset. Here, ritual refers to small acts we undertake each day, and how these may contribute to our capacity to organize, and relate to each other. Participants will carry out a series of activities as a group that each attempt to codify a mundane ritual between the participants. We will hear a range of responses to these prompts, the responses themselves forming the basis of strategies for practice and organization that may be carried forward by the group within and beyond the temporary virtual window of the Zoom meeting.

Preparatory Work

Participants should be in a space they are comfortable to move around and make noise in, and are asked to bring a snack for a virtual pot-luck.

Leonard Hobbins

Leonard Hobbins started architecture practice Groupwork with Tessa Forde and Simon Glaister, and is a team member of pre:fab architecture collective who ran for president of Te Kāhui Whaihanga, the New Zealand Institute of Architects earlier this year. Leonard studied at the University of Auckland and is a Licensed Building Practitioner. 

Jesse Melville

Jesse Melville is a surfer and horticulturist living in the Coromandel Peninsula. Jesse is a computer technician and has lived in several communes around New Zealand.

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