Writing as Infrastructure: Workshops for Arts Professionals 2025構寫潛流：藝術人才工作坊

‘Writing as Infrastructure: Workshops for Arts Professionals’ (12–20 July 2025) brought together curators, writers, researchers and cultural workers to explore writing and publishing as expanded practices of ‘making public’ – shaping and framing public knowledge and expression, and forging collectivities of different intensities. The programme attended to the background infrastructure that enables such circulation and relation, from material systems and institutional protocols to affective infrastructures: the felt, often invisible conditions that frame how we collaborate, communicate and sustain collective life.

Over nine days, fifteen participants selected through an open call took part in site visits, facilitated conversations and collaborative workshops, joined by invited facilitators from across Asia and beyond: Clara Balaguer, Display Distribute, Ahmad Makia, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, HG Masters and Nie Xiaoyi, among others. The eighth edition of Para Site’s Workshops for Arts Professionals was curated by Daniel Szehin Ho.

Open House: Who needs an editor?

Is there a divide between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ editing? How do art writers – critics? – sustain themselves in an economy that undervalues words? Drawing on her bilingual editorial work across Qilu Criticism, ArtReview China and LEAP, this conversation with Nie Xiaoyi reflected on editing as a situated, collective practice shaped by friendship, censorship, money, translation and day-to-day maintenance.

The Open House closed the workshops with an afternoon of conversations and performances, alongside Clara Balaguer’s ‘Vernacular Language Playlist’ and Ahmad Makia’s ‘Hyperpublishing’.