2025 - 2026 FACTORY student led: The Polite Silence: a conversation on the rhetorics of inclusion
“Nowadays, it is fashionable to talk about race or gender; the uncool subject is class. It’s the subject that makes us all tense, nervous, uncertain about where we stand.”
— bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters
A common way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues. But I’m interested in another perspective: the politics of the art field as a place of work — what it does, not just what it declares.
Class, race, gender, sexuality, and geography are deeply entangled categories, yet class seems to be the one we’re least equipped to discuss. In the contemporary art field, this silence reproduces hierarchies of access, taste, and legitimacy. The rhetoric of inclusion often aestheticises difference while keeping material inequalities intact.
This workshop invites a collective reflection on how class is performed, what it means to perform classlessness in a field that presents itself as inclusive, yet quietly upholds privileges. How can we talk about class and our own positioning without shame or defensiveness, without resorting to individual perspectives or taking everything personally? How might feelings like envy become politically generative rather than paralyzing?
No conclusions and no guilt — just a rehearsal for upcoming conversations where we acknowledge contradictions and ask ourselves and each other the questions we usually politely avoid.
This workshop is part of Carlos Azeredo Mesquita’s thesis research, The Polite Silence: class origin and the rhetoric of inclusion in the contemporary art world, unfolding across four sessions.
MARCH 12, 2026
SESSION 3: Misreading Class: Position and Perception
Led by Carlos Azeredo Mesquita & Dana Andrei
Capacity: 10 participants (max)
When: 11:00 - 13:00
Location: Il Sicomoro
In the previous sessions, we mapped the questions we’re politely told not to ask and noticed what becomes visible when we try to answer them collectively. In this third session, we’ll return to questions about money, and move beyond the notion of income as a distinctive measure of class. We’ll look at class as a relational position shaped by wealth, stability, inheritance, debt, support networks, and access to risk, and consider why it is often difficult to locate ourselves accurately within these structures. We’ll compare self-perception with statistics and other indicators relating to class position, and explore how ideas of merit, precarity, and success influence how we understand our own position, and how this understanding often diverges from the conditions we actually inhabit. Together, we will think through what forms of solidarity can emerge from a more elaborate understanding of our class position.
JANUARY 20, 2026
SESSION 2: Seeing Positions, Naming Structure
Led by Carlos Azeredo Mesquita & Dana Andrei
Capacity: 10 participants (max)
When: 11:00 - 13:00
Location: Saltanes
In the previous session, we mapped the questions we’re politely told not to ask in order to keep conversations safe and social structures opaque. In this second session, we’ll try to answer some of these questions collectively, without focusing on individual stories. We’ll pay attention to what becomes visible in the room: group patterns, clusters, gaps, and the feelings that emerge. We’ll reflect on what it felt like to see and be seen in positions that may reveal inequality, and on how ideas of merit and legitimacy shape what feels speakable or unspeakable in the art world — including feelings that are usually considered impolite, unattractive, or difficult to admit. Together we will come up with ways to address these topics and reveal their emancipatory potential, as well as strategies to bring them up when it matters.
NOVEMBER 24, 2025
SESSION 1: Performing Equality, Rehearsing Privilege
Led by Carlos Azeredo Mesquita & Dana Andrei
Capacity: 10 participants (max)
When: 10:00 - 12:00
Location: Yoga Room (ground floor)
In this first session, we’ll map the discomfort. Why is talking about class, privilege, and economic inequality so uncomfortable, even among people who agree that these things matter? We’ll look at why class feels hard to name, how identity becomes moralized, and how we each navigate our contradictions as individuals and as artists working inside the structures we critique. The goal is to reflect on how we speak, what we avoid, and what kinds of uncertainties emerge when we (hopefully) start talking. Together we’ll explore ways of speaking about inequality that don’t rely on guilt or virtue, but on shared curiosity, honesty, and political clarity.