Workstyles: a Site-Specific Curriculum

Creative work is a way of life at Mildred’s Lane, and Workstyles is the ecological curriculum by which practitioners at Mildred’s Lane weave creative labor through every aspect of living, which has evolved over 25 years of experimental practice.

There are no private studios at Mildred’s Lane; rather, the whole site becomes a collective space for creative engagement. Nor is there a permanent staff supplying a service industry for residents and guests; rather, every participant at Mildred’s Lane contributes to the domestic needs of the collective and the site, engaging in “creative domesticating” guided by the curriculum of Workstyles. The system cultivates an expanded view of artistic work, which does not relegate certain labors to the realm of tedious chores, but elevates them to creative acts in themselves.

 The Workstyles curriculum is a continuity that runs through our ever-evolving, experimental program. All residency programs include an orientation to Workstyles. The goal of Workstyles is for shared experiences at Mildred’s Lane to have lifelong effects on how we think of ourselves as creative practitioners functioning in the 21st century. Workstyles invites us to question our relationships with our environment, with each other, with systems of labor, forms of dwelling, and with art.

Workstyles is motivated by a collective urge to devise sustainable ways of living for the 21st century, rooted in mutual stewardship and care. It constitutes an “ethics of comportment” that helps residents engage in more rigorous and rewarding ways with everyday life, with each other, and with the site. The Greek root of the word ecology is oikos, or house, fundamentally connecting concepts of domesticity with ecology. Workstyles invites us to re-consider how we inhabit the world through the shared home of Mildred’s Lane.

You will leave Mildred’s Lane with skills you didn’t have before, and, hopefully, with a sense of satisfaction having contributed to a community-based project. We hope you will come away sharing our conviction that Being is the practice.

Workstyles (werk-stīls)

1) The embodiment of any practitioners' work-live-research environment as a developed, aesthetic, and rigorous engagement with every aspect of life. 2) Interpersonal and intrapersonal everyday connections between working, making, cooking – living centered on new modes of being in the world. (see comportment) (see systems thinking) (see system esthetics, Jack Burnham. 3) Evoking a social and political entanglement that incorporates questions such as; a) sustainable relations to the environment b) relationships to each other, c) systems of labor, d) forms of dwelling, e) design apparatuses and, f) creative and inventive domesticating – all of which compose ethics of comportment. This is embodied in Mildred's Lane Projects, which encompass a working-living-researching-making strategy, co-evolving a rigorous, critical engagement with every aspect of life – being IS the practice. Origin: neologism of Mildred's Lane, Pa. c. late 20c. Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, life.
Excerpts from the Glossary of Mildred’s Lane

In nature the normal way trees flourish is by their association in a forest. Each tree may lose something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival.
Alfred North Whitehead, ‘Concepts of Nature’

Existence in not an individual affair
Karen Barad, ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’