Collective Neighbourhood News Lab

The Wedding borough is home to a multitude of languages and generations of neighbours from various geographies whose lives intersect daily. The Wedding Affairs newspaper workshop reflects on the necessity of inclusion and representation in print media. It seeks to create an exploratory two-iteration print outlet driven by the Wedding community that brings together the entangled voices and cultures that make up the fabric of our neighbourhood.

In this two-workshop series led by the Cuban artist Yoel Diaz Vazquez, Wedding residents from various backgrounds are invited to collectively fabulate and create the foundation for an inclusive and multicultural newspaper publishing house. Something they will do with empathy for their readers and from interdisciplinary and multimedia artistic practices that include writing, drawing, sewing, weaving, collage, printing and whatever skills the participants are capable of, to bring a mockup of a potential first issue to life.

This democratic and collective action will be carried out by imagining and symbolically elaborating all the creative and productive infrastructure that a supposed publishing house needs. With the opportunity and the space provided by the SAVVY Contemporary pillars SAVVY.doc and Wedding Affairs we pose the question: What could a newspaper that aims to represent the entangled and multicultural experiences of Wedding’s community truly look like?

Yoel Diaz Vazquez is a Cuban interdisciplinary visual artist who received his degree in sculpture from the Fine Arts Academy San Alejandro, Havana. His works have been exhibited at the 29th Biennial of São Paulo, the Biennial of Goteborg, SAVVY Contemporary, NGBK in Berlin and recently at the Santa Mònica Art Space in Barcelona, among others. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2009.  

Diaz Vazquez projects explore the influence of power, ideology, and colonization in relation to social, cultural, and historic memories, as well as individual and collective responses to challenge power. His artistic practice is based on the transformation of materials he obtains through his own documentary record and work with archives.

In his most recent project, Diaz Vazquez created a contemporary and fictional re-edition of a historical Cubans newspaper called Previsión. His goal has been to recognize the social and political trajectory of Afro-Cubans and to propose a historical revision of the origins of racism in Cuba.