WORKSHOPS./
Workshops are at the heart of EASA: spaces for collective exploration, making, and learning over two weeks. Led by tutors from diverse creative fields, they focus on open-ended processes rather than fixed outcomes, encouraging curiosity, experimentation, and shared inquiry.
Responding to the theme Seanchaí and the context of Waterford, participants engage with the city through observation, conversation, and hands-on work. Learning is horizontal, knowledge is shared, and everyone contributes their skills and perspectives.
Workshops value process as much as results, with space for reflection and change. Care, collaboration, consent, and respect shape how they unfold, alongside an awareness of time, energy, and wellbeing.
They are part of a wider environment that includes talks, excursions, and shared daily life, extending learning beyond the workspace.
All Gather at the Cabin-
"A ray of sunshine warms my right cheek. I open my eyes and wake up in a lucid dream. It’s c
loudy, but the single ray of sunlight streaming in illuminates a small structure. I approach it and strike up a conversation with four homeless people (or so I thought). After a long chat, I realise that where I am is neither a cabin, nor a pavilion, nor a shelter. It is the spitting image of Seanchai."
An Apparatus of Earthly Fabulations-
An Apparatus of Earthly Fabulations is a craft-based workshop exploring materials as carriers of story, memory, and place. Drawing on Irish rituals of straw weaving, symbolic motifs, and sacred landscapes, participants gather plant residues, soil, textiles, and found matter across Waterford.
Through weaving, steam bending, woodworking, and textiles, each participant creates a personal device that retells human and non-human narratives. Guided by the gestures of the Seanchai, the work is shaped through joining, carving, bending, disruption, and weaving. Individual devices and a collective textile map form a spatial exhibition. The result is not a tool, but a companion inseparable from the route, the collective act, and the materials that formed it.
An Taoille Tuile-
Irish culture is rooted in the shifting relationship between the island’s inhabitants and the surrounding sea. The rhythm of the tides reveals what remains when the water recedes: seaweed.
This workshop seeks to rediscover the historic bond between Irish people and marine vegetation by retracing the paths of seaweed gatherers. Participants will construct a pavilion for drying seaweed, allowing it to be transformed into materials such as paper.
The pavilion becomes a space for collective expression, where inhabitants leave traces of pasts and imagined futures through their own marks. Seaweed shifts from a remnant of history to a material for reimagining the future.
Babini Devitini-
“Babini Devetini” is a workshop that explores folklore superstitions as living cultural knowledge shaping everyday life. Inspired by storytelling traditions like the Irish seanchaí, it focuses on how narratives influence behavior, space, and collective memory. Through fieldwork in Waterford, participants gather local sayings and stories, engaging with the community as keepers of intangible heritage. This material is transformed into visual archives, diagrams, and a conceptual map, leading to a series of temporary scenographic interventions across the city.
The workshop frames storytelling as a form of “invisible architecture,” revealing how stories actively shape social and spatial realities.
BA-WAGON-
BA-WAGON is a spontaneous vehicle travelling with and within the EASA community, collecting stories and memories (with a slight preference for those messy ones).
BA-WAGON looks at the intimate everyday and finds there what keeps the community alive: mundane tasks, complaints and gossip. The structure accesses those stories through borrowing from the tradition of religious confessional architecture and the modern reality show confessional rooms.
BA-WAGON is a nomadic occupation of space for comfort, venting, bragging, gossip and speaking in tongues. We’re here to talk, listen, forward to the community or keep within the walls. The decision is yours but we don’t guarantee the walls to be sturdy enough to keep everything intact. If you don’t want to talk at least we can teach you how to pronounce EASA BAŁAGAN 2027.
BETWEEN THRESHOLDS-
A baby does not know it is about to be born; birth can feel like death. We explore thresholds between life and death, and what lies beyond, walking, talking, gathering stories and objects, and performing small rituals that question disappearance and return.
Clay is shaped, a bier is built, things are buried, a funeral is held, a tree is planted, and a portal assembled. We attempt to access different realities through collective making. What remains is part installation, part shared memory, part unfolding puzzle.
Welcome to the space in-between. Doors are already open, a threshold awaits.
Image by Imaan @herkeptpromise
BEYOND BELIEF -
REVERSE CHRONOLOGY IS STORYTELLING TOLD BACKWARD: YOU SEE THE END FIRST, THEN DISCOVER HOW IT ALL CAME TOGETHER. WE’RE BRINGING THAT IDEA INTO ARCHITECTURE. INSTEAD OF DESIGNING FROM SCRATCH, WE START WITH BUILDINGS THAT ALREADY EXIST.. COMPLETE, BUILT, STANDING.. AND WORK BACKWARD IN TIME. WHAT’S REALLY HOLDING THEM UP? WHAT MATERIALS, STRUCTURAL CHOICES, AND HIDDEN COMPROMISES ARE BURIED BEHIND THE FINISHED SURFACES? WE WILL REVERSE-ENGINEER THE UNDERLYING LOGIC, DECONSTRUCT EXISTING BUILDINGS AND QUESTION OUR ASSUMPTIONS.
cURRENTLY cONSTRUCTING-
Currently constructing... a workshop at the intersection of craftmanship, storytelling and architecture through maritime knowledge. We gather hands-on experience from the local boatbuilders at the McLoughlin Boat Company in Waterford while exchanging sailor's shanties, nautical lore and other stories related to the water. Learning from shipbuilding and maintenance techniques, participants collectively design and build an architectural structure inspired by the construction of boats. Ready to sail along?
EALTA SCEALTA-
Someone told you something once. You held onto it, passed it on, and somewhere along the way it became a little bit yours.
Every story you love has already changed. Not dramatically - just enough. A detail softened here, a feeling sharpened there, a character who grows more vivid with each telling precisely because they're drifting further from whoever they actually were. Memories get quietly rewritten each time they float to the surface.
The seanchaí kept their community's history alive not by preserving it perfectly, but by keeping it in motion. We are going to follow that course.
easa Archive-
The EASA Archive is the collectively maintained record of every annual assembly since EASA’s founding in Liverpool in 1981, sustained by voluntary commitment and reinterpreted with each new assembly. At EASA Seanchaí, it is read as a reservoir of silhouettes, gestures, and fragments to be re-cast and re-projected.
Translating Waterford’s craft traditions into exhibition elements, the installation repositions the archive as a device for rendering EASA’s accumulated histories into a grammar that resonates with the city’s mythology. It brings into dialogue Waterford’s industrial identity and the iterative act of voluntary assembly.
An experimental film extends this inquiry as a visual essay on the assembly across time, alongside a podcast series with EASA Dinos that preserves living lore.
EASA aRTbOOK-
Over the course of the workshop, participants will work with various graphic techniques. The final outcome will be the publication of an art book produced in a limited edition. The slow, meditative act of making linocuts and cyanotypes will unfold alongside personal storytelling shared by the artists [participants] through which the conceptual content of the publication will emerge.
EASA FM-
EASA.FM is an open community platform that brings people together through the medium of sound by providing your ears with sweet tunes, soothing voices, groovy rhythms and experimental jest. We see the radio format as a modern extension of the oral storytelling tradition and invite you to join us around the metaphorical fireplace that is the EASA site, as we channel the spirit of Úaithne to soundtrack your daily workshop activities and shenanigans.
EAT, SLEEP, RAM, REPEAT -
In Ireland, the wall carries a long architectural memory, shaping ritual, settlement, and everyday life. It defines what is inside and outside, yet remains a place of encounter, somewhere to lean, sit, cross, and repair. Never truly finished, the wall is maintained, questioned, and rebuilt through collective action.
During eat, sleep, ram, repeat, we will build a rammed earth wall as a contemporary interpretation of this enduring element in the landscape. As it rises, it will become a space for communal activities, from shared meals and performances to screenings and sleepovers.
Alongside the construction, participants will create a film that captures and reimagines the process. Projected back onto the wall, these stories will reflect the encounters, labour, and collective life that emerge through making together.
This workshop values process over product. The building site becomes a social space, and the wall becomes a shared artefact shaped by many hands and many stories.
FEED THE SUIR, SEEK THE DRUID-
Inspired by the spirit of the seanchaí, this workshop invites participants to engage with the landscape as an archive, challenging conventional ways of reading a place through storytelling, walking, performance and embodied encounters. Taking on the role of the druid or druidess, participants will seek to interpret, negotiate and communicate with the land, its histories and its more-than-human inhabitants.
Anchored along the Suir River, read as a radical timekeeper of the landscape, the workshop will move daily through different sites, gathering traces, stories and observations. Through communal readings, material explorations and collective making, participants will weave together fragmented encounters into a shared, evolving narrative. The final outcome will be co-created by all participants: a temporary installation and collective reading of an entangled landscape, shaped by many voices in the spirit of the seanchaí.
Holy Moly-
Holy Moly will be a processional float. A performative float. A deeply heartfelt one.
What are the silent legends floating around Waterford, and who represents them? Where do the foundations of the city lie? Inspired by the solemn, hand-carried platforms of ancient traditions born from a shared devotion to a common myth: Holy Moly will search for these silent stories. Through collective effort and shared passion, we will aim to elevate them to a prominent, even sacred, position.
i love you so much i want to have FAMILECTS with you-
Lean in close and tell me what image made you think of a memory so vivid in your mind, but could not describe? How would you tell it anyway? Do you need new words for it?
Let us scalpel our way through language, and pinpoint the effervescent EASA dialect. Look into how does a new word actually appear, and then make the behemoth effort to also spread and reach the dictionary. Conjure what concepts of our reality would benefit from a new linguistic symbol. Plumpen the ideas and turn them into familects, which we then put up to truly unique feats of translation, in our city of native speakers.
It’s just a stage-
Calling all faggots, dykes, and criminal queers (+ allies)!
Building on queer and performance studies, it’s just a stage is a playground in which we will collectively investigate how to archive fleeting moments at EASA, such as that sweaty kiss on the dance floor or a joke shared while washing dishes. We will co-create a stage using a modular system, developing scenographic and spatial strategies through hands-on making and performative experimentation. Working in groups, participants will devise performances that engage with storytelling in its broadest sense, from spoken word and dance to DJ sets, while testing how material, body, and space interact.
KISSENBURG-
The Kissenburg reclaims the childhood pillow fort as a space for retreat, imagination and exchange. By crouching, ducking and crawling inside, participants enter a different mode of being; softer, slower and more open.
Within this temporary architecture, personal stories and fairytales are shared as ways of making sense of the world. Anyone can enter to listen, rest, contribute a story or simply spend time inside.
Over two weeks, the Kissenburg will evolve through collective encounters, while stories are gathered through conversation, drawings, collages, scrapbooks and recordings, forming a shared archive of experiences. The Kissenburg also serves as preparation for INCM Spieglein Spieglein, where reflection becomes central.
please hold-
Are you tired of bad signals, lost connections, and that one person who insists “it’s working perfectly on my end”? Could your means of communication be streamlined?
At PLEASE HOLD, we believe they can.
A simple solution: a piece of string between two cans. No screens, no chargers, just tension, distance, and a direct line.
What starts as a basic device quickly becomes something else: a growing network. Sound becomes physical: stretching, glitching, refusing to behave. Messages bend, fragment, and return altered.
As connections multiply, the system expands into space. Lines become structures, nodes become encounters. A collective installation emerges: open, unstable, alive.
No signal? No problem.
…PLEASE HOLD.
LOOMSDAY-
Loomsday explores the return of apocalyptic thinking in contemporary society, revisiting “apocalypse” in its original sense as revelation, moments where crisis exposes hidden truths and reshapes collective understanding.
Drawing on the history of the Waterford wool trade, the workshop reimagines rug-making as storytelling and spatial practice. Through collective research and hand-tufting, participants create textile narratives rooted in Irish landscapes as unstable archives shaped by extraction, care and survival.
Emphasising slowness and materiality, the final installation becomes a tactile narrative where crisis is held in softness, offering unexpected warmth, as only a rug can.
MAKING SAIL-
“Making Sail” is a hands-on construction workshop that explores how architecture can tell stories through making. Drawing from Waterford’s Viking and maritime heritage, participants will collaboratively build a temporary pavilion of timber frames and textile sails, using traditional knotting and natural dyeing techniques. Inspired by the tension and movement of ship sails, the structure forms a spatial installation that feels both grounded and in motion. Through the collective act of building, tying, and assembling, the workshop becomes a way of translating history into form, where materials and gestures carry memory, and participants take on the role of contemporary storytellers within the spirit of the seanchaí.
Myths we live; Veiled, Reimagined-
Myths we live; Veiled, Reimagined treats storytelling as a living, collective practice, reinterpreting archetypal figures from Irish folklore. Incomplete narratives, defined by behaviour and atmosphere, are translated by participants into physical masks, where making becomes a form of understanding and embodiment.
Guided by the spirit of the seanchaí, the workshop unfolds through making, collecting and narrating. Participants develop rituals and a shared script shaped by their time in the city, engaging its landscapes as sites of memory, transformation and myth-making.
These fragments evolve into a collective narrative, culminating in a ritual-like performance where masked characters inhabit and reinterpret the city through movement and storytelling.
Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin-
“Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin” explores inhabited space, collective memory, and the idea of home. Through philosophical, literary and sociological references, participants reflect on what home means to them, to others, and to those they do not yet know.
Introducing basic interview and discussion methods, the workshop uses qualitative approaches to develop artistic and narrative practices around intimate concepts of belonging. Guided by the question “What is your home?”, it seeks to build shared ground and contribute to a collective memory of the EASA community.
Not so Nocturnal Animals-
We are animals, whose senses have been taken away by the darkest of the nights, wandering around, tired and aimless. We seek to hear the wisdom of the ancestral stones, the advice of the elderly trees and the stories that the ancient walls want to share. But first we must create a new language to understand what we cannot see... Through the creation of a series of audiovisual artifacts, we will translate and explore the invisible realm, the vibrations and energies that surround us. Evolving into (not-so) nocturnal animals.
Persons Unknown-
Within many social movements, written records are often hesitant, self-censored, and authorless. “Persons Unknown,” a legal term for anonymous defendants, reflects this invisibility in activist histories. Parallels can be drawn with the seanchaí, custodian of Gaelic oral history and a form of cultural resistance.
If memory is fragile yet resistant, how can oral histories be preserved and shared?
This workshop explores visual communication as a means of solidarity and consciousness-building. Through badges and banners, participants translate oral histories into graphics and textiles, drawing on protest traditions to share personal and collective experiences of activism.
Pickled futures-
Learning from the Feast of Futures: Eastern Futurism in Art, Food, and Gathering, we add Architecture to the table. Eastern Futurism functions through reflective nostalgia, using the ruins of the past to analyze and critique the present. In these reflections, time is plural; the material reality of the present is always also a glimpse into an alternative future.
Through activities such as pickling, fermenting, loud reading, and engaging with locals, we will individually and collectively embody the role of the Seanchaí: archiving, teaching, and solidarizing—using the Summer Assembly to ferment thoughts for the winter. Additionally, to emphasize our collective gathering as architects and spatial practitioners, we will work with our hands to develop a model of the city of Salgótarján, Hungary, where the 2027 Winter School is to be held. This represents a perfect case of 'Pickled Futurism,' a term borrowed from Anna Tokareva’s manifesto.
Rembrella 26-
Rembrella explores the kiosk as a civic heart within the city; asking how a small structure can become a space for exchange, gathering and idea-making. Can a true “third space” emerge within just two weeks, not only as a structure, but as a shared atmosphere?
The umbrella is treated not just as shelter, but as a frame for conversation and collective memory: what stories does a community carry, and what makes people stop, sit and talk?
Participants will build a kiosk and test formats of communication: newspaper, poetry slam, performative reading, treating it as both platform and structure. Rather than generating ideas top-down, the workshop curates what emerges, collecting stories and putting them back into circulation.
tales of truth and place-
Tales of Truth & Place is a theoretical and creative workshop exploring how architecture constructs and communicates narratives of truth. Using Reginald’s Tower as a starting point, participants read the built environment as a storytelling medium, uncovering embedded histories, ideologies and meanings.
The workshop unfolds in two parts: first investigation through observation, mapping and reflection; then authorship, where participants construct and translate their own narratives into speculative visual proposals.
Drawing on philosophy, architecture and mythology, it proposes truth as something produced and narrated rather than fixed, positioning participants between research and fiction as storytellers of place.
Sacred, Superstitious, Vernacular-
Sacred, Superstitious, Vernacular explores how myths, beliefs and folklore shape architecture and spatial practice. It starts from the idea that belief does not exist outside space, but actively organises it through thresholds, building orientation, protected zones and ritual routes.
Working in the city, participants use walks, mapping, discussion and observation to trace how invisible systems of meaning manifest in the built environment. Focusing on local folklore and participants’ cultural experience, the workshop considers how memory, fear and imagination shape space.
Combining research and practice from field notes to temporary architectural experiments, the process culminates in a collective ephemeral installation or performative route. These translate stories into spatial rules, framing architecture as a vehicle for narrative, cultural memory and collective experience.
SNUG LIFE-
It’s a Snug Life… the fire’s roaring, the rain gently taps and rolls across the frosty windows of the pub. Nestled in our snug, we laugh and whisper and gossip - our pints, perched on their small shelves, listen intently, emerging from all sorts of hatches and windows. The snug, perfectly peripheral, forms the most intimate of social spaces, a typology through which we will explore what is arguably the most integral part of Irish culture, the pub. Join us; embark upon a pub crawl, (perhaps with a little more surveying than you’re used to), build our snug, fill it with mosaic and stained glass and whatever else we may collect along the way, for all of EASA to see… but maybe not to hear!
Care Laboratory -
Why Care? draws on Joan C. Tronto & Bernice Fisher’s idea of care as a species activity: everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so we can live in it as well as possible, interweaving bodies, selves and environment into a life-sustaining web.
For EASA 2026, we explore eight facets of care in the architectural process: collectiveness, communication, inclusivity, information, time, economic trajectory, sustainability and buildings. EASA becomes an open laboratory, gathering knowledge and developing a shared “Code of Care” through diverse voices.
Engaging with care theory, eco- and intersectional feminism and critical spatial practice, the workshop draws inspiration from Waterford to reflect on a common future in architecture moving beyond individuality and nationality towards solidarity and collective practice.
THE Embassy of mythologies -
Embassy of Mythologies is a hands-on workshop where architecture becomes narrative. Participants design and build a mobile “storytelling machine” that carries voices, histories and imagination into public space.
Working through drawing, writing, sound and fieldwork in Waterford, stories are gathered from the city and transformed into a living, performative structure. Part archive, part stage and part spectacle, the Embassy travels into public space, inviting others to share myths and leave their mark.
Blending building, craft and storytelling, the workshop creates a temporary, chaotic and alive structure, where stories become architecture, and architecture becomes storyteller.
The MOONGATE-
The Moon Gate explores the seanchaí through the traditional Irish craft of dry stone walling. As a vessel of memory and storytelling, the seanchaí represents knowledge passed through people, each story a thread in a shared fabric of folklore. Here, the Moon Gate adds its own thread, allowing the landscape itself to become a storyteller.
Through the bricolage of dry stone construction, the work creates a direct link between material and place, reviving traditional craftsmanship while embedding itself in the landscape it inhabits.
Stories and memories formed in its presence inscribe it into the land until, over time, it decays and returns, leaving behind traces of collective care and making.
Tiles & tales-
Join us to transform Waterford into a canvas for a city-wide comic strip. We’ll explore the city, gather local lore, and design a serialized narrative to be "written" in stone and tile. Using low-cost, salvaged bathroom ceramic tiles, we will create a series of mosaic frames placed in strategic locations, creating a physical trail that invites the viewer to follow a story by taking a walk through the city streets.
waterford makers exchange -
Waterford Maker’s Exchange is a workshop on wheels! We will drift through the city offering our built environment expertise to anyone who dare ask. Our workbench holds all the tools we need to build our way around the city. On our journey we will fulfil all requests but will expect unique payment. Accepting whatever people offer, gives us opportunities to observe and learn by drawing comparisons and conclusions on the value of architecture. This method of accepting whatever we are given opens the workshop to possibility and adventure. We hope to learn lessons only Waterford can teach. Each participant will be able to take their own approach and will build on their own experience. Together we will build and share stories, what’s going to happen next, is up to Waterford.
traces of presence-
What creature could be living in Waterford unnoticed, and what traces have they left behind? An footprint where no one walked, a shadow that shouldn’t exist, or a perfect circle in a corn field. Is it a coincidence, or a pattern? We’re gathering clues and building our own urban myth through exploration, craft and photography. Together, we will gather and document the traces of presence. Come conspire with us!
WHERE IS EVERYBODY?-
Where is EveryBody? explores how the body can become a collective, spatially active object. Through uniformity and anonymity, participants reduce individual expression to form a single, non-hierarchical body that moves, pauses and reacts in space.
Following a daily protocol:dressing in uniform, entering public and semi-public sites, observing, pausing and regrouping, the body generates temporary spatial conditions without building anything fixed. It operates space rather than representing it, producing mass, edge, threshold and obstruction through presence alone.
Encounters with passersby reveal how spatial norms are constructed and disrupted. Over ten days, reflection and documentation run alongside action, asking: Where is EveryBody?
Unun33-
In unun33, we are strict about not learning anything and not constructing anything. We are unbuilding as an independent deconstructive tool of transitional care for built architectural elements. We are unlearning our layered experiences as a form of criticism towards imposed and embedded narratives. We see where unbuilding and unlearning overlap to understand the relevance of deconstructive practices and prepare a foundation for constructing shared alternative mythologies.
uvo-
UVO is a temporary acoustic sanctuary designed to collect unjudged personal truths. Relying on an automated digital mediator, it materializes ephemeral voice recordings into a continuous, slowly disappearing physical archive of receipts
EASA TV-
EASA TV touches upon the heart of Seanchaí: storytelling. It is about collecting the lore behind the scenes, learning to observe, and reading between the lines. It transforms into stories the things that try to remain unnoticed, moving from the defined format into the unknown, because who can plan EASA anyway?
In this workshop, we hope to have fun and be funny, while learning how to observe and create narratives. We want to tell stories of people and places, of EASA and Waterford, and of those who would like to spill some harmless tea. As a result, we are aiming to produce one or two episodes of EASA TV, something that will make people laugh, become nostalgic after EASA, and perhaps even turn into the sequel to another Lord of the Rings or a mumblecore mockumentary.
RECONTEXTUALISING MYTHOLOGY-
Throughout history the role of the Seanchai or storyteller has been a tool of education, forewarning, moral guidance and political activism. However, in an age of 24 hour news, where information and knowledge is so readily available, one can feel overwhelmed and disillusioned with the world; the role of the storyteller in the community is lost. But it is a tradition important not to lose. Reinvigorate yourself and become your own Seanchai, utilise tools both ancient and modern. And ask yourself the question: how can we use storytelling for active good?