"The Art of Holding Space" Masterclass (2025 May 5-30) was designed for artists, makers, creatives, and cultural practitioners seeking to expand their practice into socially engaged art, community facilitation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Participants will receive comprehensive training, mentorship, and the opportunity to present their collaborative practice or community art work at OFF Biennálé 2025, Hungary’s largest independent contemporary art event. This program is intended for professionals who wish to move beyond individual creation and develop projects that foster collective experiences, participatory methods, and meaningful social impact.
PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
"The Art of Holding Space" Masterclass is designed to equip artists, makers, creatives, and cultural practitioners with the skills, confidence, and strategies necessary to design, implement, and lead participatory projects, transformative experiences, design and hold creative spaces, build communities.
The program focuses on:
  • Acquiring tools for facilitation, community engagement, and participatory practices
  • Develop your own toolbox with exercises, objects, images
  • Setting a frame, leading a group, and enjoy leading
  • Understanding how to create and hold brave spaces for artistic exploration, critical thinking, and empowerment
  • Developing a participatory art project with active audience engagement (workshops, spaces, multi-sensory experiences, community actions, etc.), testing it in a small group setting, then a bigger group setting within OFF Biennial 2025
  • Extending existing work (pieces, performances) with an educational or community aspect that shifts audience participation from passive to active
  • Receiving individual mentorship
  • Gaining professional visibility through a final presentation at OFF Biennial 2025
PROGRAM STRUCTURE
Week 1: Theory & Discussions
  • Critical perspectives on socially engaged art
  • Addressing sensitive topics, taboos, rhetorics, and mainstream discourses
  • Introduction to facilitation methods and radical pedagogies
  • Development of an individual project outline

​Week 2: Testing & Piloting
  • Conceptualizing a pilot version of the collaborative practice or community project (workshop, experience, space, interactive dispositive…)
  • Testing ideas in a small group setting
  • Refining artistic and theoretical approaches
  • Creating exercises, toolbox, methods

Week 3: Practice & Implementation
  • Individual mentorship and hands-on facilitation practice
  • Holding spaces and leading group experiences
  • Key topics:
    • Creating a frame and making sure it is respected
    • Differentiation and separation of spaces, roles, functions
    • Assuming responsibility: finding our leadership style and redefining authority
    • Discussing copyright and ownership in collective work
    • Exploring alternative financial models to build and sustain artistic spaces, practices, and communities
  • Evening sessions dedicated to group facilitation

Week 4: Documentation & Follow-Up (Online)
  • Archiving and reflective practice
  • Planning next steps for project sustainability

quick facts

  • Masterclass title: 
    ​The Art of Holding Space: Creative Leadership & Facilitators Training
  • Date: May 5-30, 2025​
    • WEEK 1, May 5, 6, 8, 9: 10:00–13:00 / 1111 Gallery
    • WEEK 2, May 12, 13, 15, 16: 10:00–13:00 / 1111 Gallery
    • WEEK 3, May 19, 20, 23: 17:00–20:00 / 1111 Gallery + May 24: 14:00–17:00 / 1111 Gallery + 
    • WEEK 4, May 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 / Online
      This final week, conducted online with daily prompts, offers five days of guidance for framing, structuring, and refining your practice. You’ll design both a workshop version and a longer retreat version, putting words to your process so it’s clear, repeatable, and adaptable.
  • Location: 1111 Gallery (Kende u. 1, Budapest, Hungary)
  • Language: English​

who should apply

This program is designed for artists, makers, creatives, and cultural practitioners who are interested in expanding their work into community engagement, facilitation, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Ideal candidates include:
  • Artists looking to integrate community-based approaches into their practice
  • Dancers and movement practitioners interested in workshop facilitation and interdisciplinary methodologies
  • Cultural workers, educators, and facilitators aiming to develop participatory artistic experiences
  • Activists and organizers using art as a tool for social transformation​​

selection process

Our masterclass is among the most exclusive art education programs, admitting only 4 participants per module. This ensures that we can provide highly personalized guidance and individualized attention tailored to each participant's needs. Our selection process consists of four steps:​

  1. Online application submission: Click here
  2. ​Interview: Shortlisted candidates will have a video call with the founder of the school. This is an excellent opportunity to present yourself, your professional projects, and your career objectives.
  3. Creative exercise: Shortlisted candidates will respond to a creative prompt in either Performance or Creative Writing. They will have one week to submit their proposition. This exercise offers a beautiful opportunity to engage with our learning materials and pedagogic tools in a hands-on experience.
  4. Final selection: Candidates will receive a decision within 2 weeks after submission.

meet your teacher

ANNA ÁDÁM

“A safe space is not a sticker. You can’t just call a space “safe” and expect it to be so. A label, a declaration, even the best intentions—none of these guarantee actual safety. And what feels safe to you might not feel safe to me. Safety is not a fixed state; it’s a continuous, negotiated process. During this masterclass, we will critically engage with urgent and complex topics such as safe spaces, trigger warning, hierarchy, authority, separation, distinction, responsibility, and the overuse of buzzwords like "radical empathy" or "politics of care". We will reintroduce the notion of frame—not as a limitation, but as a structure that protects rather than restricts. A frame sets conditions, creates clarity, and offers a foundation from which risk, experimentation, and transformation can emerge. We will challenge the mainstream discourse of horizontality, questioning how its rhetoric, while often well-intentioned, can paradoxically become an obstacle to the emergence of contemporary leaders. Leadership does not have to mean domination or oppression. We will reimagine it beyond capitalist individualism, seeking new iconographies of leadership and management that are true to our ethics—rooted in sincerity, generosity, and integrity.”

​​—Anna Ádám
Founder of the School of Disobedience

Anna Ádám pursued dual academic paths, graduating from both the ESSEC Business School and the Paris-Cergy Arts School. She is the founder and artistic director of Gray Box, founder and program creator of the School of Disobedience, the founder, producer, and curator of the Performance Now! Festival. Her extensive background as a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, cultural entrepreneur, and community activist infuses this program with invaluable insights and innovative approaches. Through her leadership, countless individuals have been empowered to make their dreams come true.