Date/Location: Thu–Sun, August 27–30 · Frankfurt am Main, Campus Bockenheim

This event is a three-day interactive gathering centered around open workshops, makerspaces, and collaborative practices. In addition to inspiring talks and conceptual input, the main focus lies on hands-on experimentation and collective making. Visitors are invited to explore new worlds, actively participate, and engage with diverse perspectives. At the same time, the event intentionally creates space for exchange, discussion, and community.

Thanks to our funding partners – die anstiftung, WDO, and Goethe University Frankfurt – we are able to offer free participation in the event. If you contribute to the program, we will reimburse your travel expenses if you wish. We can also reimburse accommodation costs if needed.

The aim of the event is to highlight the importance of open, collaborative spaces and to initiate conversations about how they enrich our shared lives and contribute to a vibrant, democratic society.

We invite you to actively shape this event! Through this open call, we aim to bring together a wide range of creative initiatives, topics, and formats. If you would like to be part of it, get in touch with us! Together, we will develop possibilities for collaboration. Spaces as well as technical support can be provided.

The conference takes place alongside the "SommerCamp of Open Workshops“. While experiences are shared and questions of collective practice are discussed in panels, conversations, and workshops, the camp becomes a space for building, repairing, cooking, coding, and improvising. Conference and camp form a shared experiential space where discourse, practical work, and everyday coexistence intertwine.

Central theme and guiding question: Why do we need open workshops?

Climate change, resource depletion, and growing social inequalities fundamentally challenge existing economic and production systems. Global supply chains, extractive resource use, and consumption models based on constant renewal generate ecological damage, intensify dependencies, and concentrate agency in the hands of a few actors. How we produce, use, and maintain things is therefore not merely a technical issue, but a societal one.

In this context, practices such as repairing, reusing, and making things ourselves are gaining importance. They represent a shift, away from linear consumption logics toward collectively sustained forms of production and creation.

Such practices require spaces where people can meet, share knowledge, and act together. Open workshops, makerspaces, and repair initiatives are such spaces of collective practice. Here, people support each other, develop practical solutions to everyday challenges, and connect technical and creative work with social values and participation.

The conference “critical making” builds on these collective approaches and brings together people who, with a focus on the common good, work both practically and reflectively on material, social, and technical infrastructures.

What we are looking for:

Contributions may:
• involve collaborative hands-on work
• share knowledge
• further develop projects
• exchange experiences
• discuss challenges
• initiate collaborations

Formats we are seeking:
• Workshops
• Artistic and technological projects
• Conversational formats
• Project presentations
• Interactive installations
• Collective experiments

Talks are possible; however, the focus lies on participatory and practice-oriented
formats.

Location & Context

The conference and camp take place at Campus Bockenheim in Frankfurt. A site where historical debates around critique, education, and practice intersect with contemporary forms of collective cultural and infrastructural work.

Following the relocation of the university, the campus has become a field of experimentation for collective practice. Around the evolving Studierendenhaus Frankfurt, a vibrant network of initiatives, artists, and cultural practitioners has emerged. Several key sites of today’s Kulturcampus were preserved from demolition through civic engagement and occupations and have been repurposed for new uses.

These include the temporary use of the Akademie der Arbeit with the ada_kantine and studios, the Dondorf printing house as an exhibition space of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and an action space for numerous civic initiatives, as well as the former art library as the site of Vision31.

Workshops, self-organized meeting places, and cultural venues such as Offenes Haus der Kulturen, MakeLab Frankfurt, and the self-managed Café Rabe – together with neighboring cultural and research institutions – shape the area as a lively district between everyday life, science, art, and activism.

Initiatives and engaged actors continue to develop the site from within its existing structures, experimenting with new forms of collaboration, resource sharing, and collective shaping of urban space.

We especially welcome contributions from:
We particularly encourage individuals and groups working in open, collaborative, and common-good-oriented contexts. This includes actors from workshops, collectives, educational and civic initiatives, as well as self-organized communities and networks.

• Open workshops & repair initiatives
• Hacker spaces & tech collectives
• Self-organized groups
• Educational initiatives
• Civic society projects
• Migrant & diasporic communities

Unfinished projects and process-oriented formats are explicitly welcome.

Submission

If you would like to be part of the program, we look forward to your submission. Briefly describe your idea, format, or approach—whether fully developed or still in process.

Please send us the following information:
• Short descript of your contribution (max. 2,000 characters)
• Desired format (e.g. workshop, talk, installation, etc.)
• Spatial and technical requirements
• Information about the contributors

Deadline: 17. Juni. 2026 23:59Uhr

A collaborative event by: MakeLab, Verbund Offener Werkstätten, anstiftung, Offenes Haus der Kulturen and Vision31

Submissions close on 2026-06-17 23:59 (Europe/Berlin), 13 hours, 41 minutes from now.