“In My Room”: Towards moody reading, making room, creating pleasure

Taking as its main prompt Mati Diop’s short film "In My Room", made during the 2020 lockdown, this workshop will explore – through moody reading and collaborative creation – the impact of the pandemic on our sense of the spaces, and specifically the rooms, that we live and work in – some shared, others inhabited alone. Questions we will explore include:

• In ‘the room’, “in my room”, how do I ‘make room’ for myself and others, where ‘the room’ is at once both a physical and interior/subjective space? 
• How has our sense of space, self and others been defined and delimited by rooms, both before and during the pandemic?
• For those who identify as women, teachers, mothers, and/or carers, how do we ‘set the mood’ in our ‘rooms’ to create intellectual and affective pleasure?

What to do before the workshop:

Watch Mati Diop’s film "In My Room" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Bd77yfvNM)
Note down a scene – or even a moment – in the film that resonates most with you
Reflect on your own responses to the questions above and make some notes
If you have time, engage with the further ‘prompts’ on the next two pages and note and gather what they make you think about (these gatherings could include a photograph, painting, line of poetry, prop/object, piece of music, or piece of prose)
Watch the 10-minute video essay which we are making in response to In My Room and which will be circulated to you a few days before the workshop
 

What we will do at the workshop:

Divide you into small break-out groups to work together for an hour sharing your notes and gatherings and making something collective out of them, so please bring them along with you! We know you don’t have much time, so they don’t need to be extensive – it could be some scribbled notes and one item.
Come back together for the second hour of the workshop to share our collective creations with one another and use them to inspire further discussion.