I was asked to run a drawing workshop at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg by the lovely people at ADA. The workshop was in conjunction with the current exhibition of Ylva Ogland‘s work. In the workshop I aimed to collectively explore the ideas found in Foucault‘s Of Other Spaces. In his essay, a piece of work that sits slightly outside of his opus, Foucault identifies a type of space that is diverse in nature, but strange in character. A space that operates under different rules to normal space, a space of social, cultural and political otherness.

The concept of heterotopia can be mobilised to examine many different spatial dynamics found within historic, present and future spaces. The work of Ogland’s in the exhibition takes the heterotopia of the mirror to unearth spaces of identity. For my workshop I focussed on a geo-political space, something I hadn’t done before.

I chose a contemporary heterotopia of crisis, where space, boundaries and borders are created, policies written and futures are condemned. For an hour and a half we be investigated the heterotopic space of global health epidemics (and other geopolitical issues); we used drawing as a tool to map the issues concerning the Ebola crisis, calling into question the objects, politics and articles of controversy. In someway, this was a hybrid workshop, bringing together ideational drawing with a Latourian approach to issue mapping. I’m not sure how successful it was, but I think it’s something I’m going to develop further.