Book Presentation and Workshop at Wiels Art Book Fair 2026

Join us on Sunday 4 October at Wiels Art Book Fair 2026, where we will be hosting a workshop and presentation of The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise: Collective Learning in Practice.

This coming weekend, WIELS in Brussels hosts a selection of independent publishers from a wide range of backgrounds, presenting everything from fanzines and artists’ books to limited editions. During the fair, we will host a book presentation and workshop in which we will explore and activate key ideas from The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise, with a focus on tools of/for collective imagining.

This publication is the outcome of the 2025–2026 Collective Learning in Practice (CLiP #7) programme curated by The Garage School at Kunstinstituut Melly. Over six months, fourteen co-learners worked with a range of guests and collaborators to develop tools, methodologies, skills, and stories in response to the question “What Can It Mean to Survive Together?”

Against a backdrop of polycrises, militarisation, and European governments advising their citizens to ‘prep’, the school explored how we might reject individualism and relate ‘otherwise’ to the question of preparedness and survival. Drawing from multiple disciplines, the school explored both foundational and unexpected aspects of community prepping and collective survival, including health, infrastructure, archiving, collapse, food, imagination, and relationality.

The resulting material not only documents the school but also translates its process into (pedagogical) tools, methodologies, insights, and games through which we might collectively approach the question of survival with curiosity, solidarity, and imagination.