Nottingham Contemporary

Pina and Biblioteka are inviting students from fine art, curatorial, art history, design, architecture, media and communication, animation, games art and other related fields, to an interdisciplinary workshop exploring the design histories of exhibitions and libraries as worldview machines.

Both libraries and exhibitions are spaces where knowledge is produced, organised and transmitted. In them, structures, categories, classifications, and the overall spatial organisation of knowledge in turn shape what knowledge is: what is considered valid, what is discarded as unrigorous, what fits inside labels and their rankings, and what is left out and discarded.

This mechanism of spatialisation and validation is subtle and hidden, and yet it is the very foundation on which an intricate and centuries-old Western view of the world is erected. The workshop ‘Worldview Machines’ is an invitation to dive into speculative design histories of how early-modern exhibitions and libraries shaped the way we understand the world today.

Almost 400 years ago, in 1644, Gabriel Naudé, a French librarian and scholar, published Advice on Establishing a Library. Many of his suggestions are still at play in 2026. In this workshop, we will start with a time-travelling exploration of the early modern events that shaped how spaces of knowledge were designed. We will use an anti-colonial and intersectional lens to learn about the ideas, motivations, objectives – and even speculate about the feelings – that these white men from the late Middle Ages had, as they lay the foundational structures that continue to shape knowledge today.

We will then analyse radical contemporary examples of libraries and exhibitions as social-spatial practices, to explore how these are transforming the modern/colonial worldview we were born into. The age of extinction is pushing us to consider different knowledge-producing systems – ones that are more entangled, less hierarchical, and more speculative.

Hosted by Nottingham Contemporary and delivered by Catalina Imizcoz, founder and editor of Pina, and Hlib Velyhorskyi, founder of Biblioteka (Architectural Association, London), we will use presentations, books, film, stories and conversation to question the classification of knowledge. During the session, we will work between disciplines to understand the ideas and motivations that could reconfigure the design of libraries and exhibition spaces for us in the present-future. This is an opportunity for students from related fields in the Midlands and its universities to get to know each other and explore the potential of joining forces with others to create interdisciplinary futures, and the social-spatial practices that host them and their worldviews.

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Access

Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here.

This event will be held in Studio 1.

This event is seated.

This event is wheelchair accessible.

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.