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Workshops in Berlin | Fab Lab Barcelona at re:publica 2026

Fab Lab Barcelona at re:publica 2026

This year, once again, Fab Lab Barcelona joins re:publica with a series of workshops, installations, and conversations exploring making as a form of collective care, cultural participation, and social infrastructure. Hosted within the Makerspace organised by Global Innovation Gathering (GIG), the programme continues a long-standing collaboration between Fab Lab Barcelona and GIG, grounded in shared values around distributed knowledge, peer learning, and community-led innovation.

Over many years, this collaboration has created opportunities for exchange between makers, researchers, artists, activists, and local communities across different contexts and geographies. At re:publica 2026, this ongoing relationship expands further through the involvement of the make-a-thek project, opening up new possibilities for collaborative textile practices, repair cultures, and situated forms of making within the festival environment.

Also! This will be the official kick-off for the make-a-thek bus tour 🤩

Workshop: Artivist Zine making as Collective Care and Imagination

18.05.2026 | 16:15–17:15 | Makerspace Community Garden

A hands-on workshop using zine-making as a practice of critical hope and imagination. Participants explore small-scale publishing as a tool for reflection, artivism, and collective care beyond dominant public narratives.

👉Link: https://re-publica.com/de/session/artivist-zine-making-collective-care-and-imagination

In times marked by ecological crisis, political fatigue, and fragmented public discourse, practices of collective imagination become acts of care. This workshop invites participants to engage in zine-making as a critical and embodied form of cultural production. Drawing on feminist pedagogy and activist design practices, the session positions zines not as nostalgic artefacts but as living tools for reflection. Participants will work individually and collectively to produce small-scale publications that respond to shared questions around care, power, and response-ability. Through prompts, discussion, and making, the workshop foregrounds process over polish. 

No prior experience is required. All materials will be provided, and participants are encouraged to bring their own perspectives, questions, and concerns into the collective space. Participants can contribute to a collective zine or make one zine on their own to take home. 

With Jessica Guy from Fab Lab Barcelona 

Participatory textile installation: Collective Stories in the Making 

Throughout the whole festival at the Makerspace in Hall 8 Community Garden

A participatory textile installation that weaves together memories, artefacts, and reflections from makers, designers, and creatives. Participants contribute through drawing, embroidery, and stamping, collectively shaping a fabric that traces past experiences and imagines futures of making.

👉Link: https://re-publica.com/de/session/collective-stories-making

Collective Stories in the Making is a dynamic, participatory installation that explores how collective memory, imagination, and practice intersect in maker cultures. The work begins with a massive textile cloth containing core narratives and physical artefacts contributed by a community of makers, designers, and creatives from Barcelona and beyond. Throughout re:publica, participants are invited to intervene in the cloth—through drawing, embroidery, stamping, and sewing—to inscribe their own stories of engagement with making. Contributions can also include hopes and visions for the next twenty years of prototyping and co-creating futures. The installation emphasises process over product: no single author or owner emerges, but rather a temporally and socially situated record of communal imagination. Following the festival, the textile will be exhibited during Barcelona Design Week and other venues, foregrounding collaborative authorship, relational knowledge, and the materialisation of shared cultural practice.

With Jessica Guy from Fab Lab Barcelona 

From Maker Faire Shows and Festivals to Social Infrastructure(s)

19.05.2026 | 13:45–14:45 | Home Base

How a seemingly generic festival format can evolve into a trusted platform for participation, community resilience, and long-term impact.

👉Link: https://re-publica.com/de/session/maker-faire-shows-and-festivals-social-infrastructures

In this session, I draw on my experience from Czechia, where Maker Faire festivals gradually evolved into a decentralized and essential social infrastructure. To open the topic at re:publica I invite others who work with networks in different cultural, social, and organizational contexts in order to explore a shared field of perspectives and practice.

Together, we will explore how these social networks form, how they change over time, and how they can be integrated more effectively for mutual aid, knowledge  and resources exchange and community resilience. For the re:publica audience, this conversation offers a chance to see how trust-based networks emerge and evolve in different settings. Where international connections add value and how locally grounded initiatives can grow into durable social infrastructures without losing their roots.

With Barbora Pesek from makemore, Fadia Elgharib from Global Innovation Gathering, Jessica Guy from Fab Lab Barcelona 

make-a-thek at the re:publica Makerspace 

Together with the make-a-thek project, Fab Lab Barcelona will co-create an interactive textile space within the re:publica Makerspace, transforming it into a site for repair, exchange, learning, and collective experimentation. Building on the shared ethos between Fab Lab Barcelona, Fashion Revolution Germany and Global Innovation Gathering, the initiative introduces new opportunities for participatory textile practices and accessible forms of making within the festival context.

Throughout the festival, visitors will be able to engage with a variety of sewing stations, collaborative repair activities, collective quilt-making sessions, and clothing swap opportunities. The space invites participants not only to make and repair together, but also to reflect on textiles as carriers of memory, care, and social connection