Art stations fundation - by Grażyna Kulczyk
online
EDN & Art Stations Foundation invite you to the next Online Atelier on 16th and 17th October. Read carefully below the invitation, the registration process and the details of the programme. Please register by 14 October latest.
Atelier online
HOLDING_TOGETHER on choreographing change
Right now we cannot be together as we know it. However, a crisis was already with us before the pandemic. A crisis precipitated by growing extremism and polarization tearing at the fabric of inter-human and interspecies relations, and our connection to nature.
Grand re Union was originally designed as a 10 days in-person gathering in June 2020 in Poznan (as a sum up of 16 years of activities of Art Stations Foundation). We designed it as an opportunity to pause, an invitation to suspend business as usual, a chance to create time, and make space for deep reflection on the global circumstances of our era. Little did we know that there would be no need to contrive the conditions under which to be suspended, that a pandemic would arrive and enforce such a pause. A pause greater than we could have imagined.
Inside that pause, our intent got reborn stronger.
Starting from the study case of Grand re Union (a project that, from a live gathering, moved in the course of very exciting but still challenging process into a year-long online platform for commissioning, collecting and archiving the wisdom of our field) this EDN ATELIER will invite us to reflect on the question HOW CAN WE STILL HOLD_TOGETHER? How we can re-design our thinking and our projects, how we can still stay creative and how we can co-imagine a new, better, future for our local and global communities and societies?
Developing Grand re Union project, we pointed out two areas that are distinctly relevant in answering these questions. The first is the plethora of somatic practices that in our digital, disembodied times reconnect us with physical experience and return to us a grounded awareness of our own body as well as respectful possible interaction with other bodies. The second is improvisation, perceived as a laboratory for brave and generous experimentation toward testing and developing the necessary adaptability to respond to ever-changing realities through considerate participation. We called for radical connection, trans-disciplinarity, and post-hierarchical collective actions.
This Atelier will offer an insight into the process of re-designing Grand re Union project. But more to it, it will be an opportunity to discuss and practice strategies for co-thinking and acting together, and, finally, it will invite participants to join the October Live Grand re Union zoom gathering of international and multi-generational group of practitioners, thinkers, writers and scholars of different disciplines that show up every third Saturady of the month to be changed and, by extension, to change the world.
Together.
Registration process:
The EDN Atelier HOLDING_TOGETHER is free of charge but registration is mandatory. It is open to anyone working for an EDN member and for associated artists. 25 participants are accepted on a first-come, first-saved basis. Deadline for registration: 14 October.
Zoom links will be provided upon registration. Register here
Programme Day 1
Friday / Oct 16th
10.00-12.00 CET | Welcome panel
The Grand re Union: choreographing change
Presentation followed by discussion with project instigators: Marta Keil (PL), Joanna Leśnierowska(PL - moderator), Julie Phelps (USA), Peter Pleyer (DE) and Rivca Rubin (UK) reporting on the initial idea and sharing insights from the process of redesigning the project in response of Corona crisis (with somatic warm up for tuning in).
12.00-14.00 CET | Workshop by Rivca Rubin
Upwording / WORDS CHANGE WORLDS (with intro lecture and break out rooms for practicing).
How small changes in the way we speak create huge impacts: From our day-to-day communication to our internal thought patterns, our relationships with ourselves and others, our attitude and approach to life, all are hugely shaped by language. Patterns of thought and speech are so governed by habit that the language we use and the impact it has on our daily interactions and stream of consciousness go largely unnoticed.
Our communications between companions, colleagues, and cultures are still riddled with phrases and concepts that cultivate hierarchies and superiority, uphold inequalities, and involve coercion and obedience. If we want to create environments that nurture mutual benefit and promote autonomy and responsible living, it would be beneficial to re-wire our thinking and make active shifts in intention and language. Upwording our conversations, messages and agreements, breaks the authoritarian trap, raises self-esteem, facilitates collaborative imagination and collective action. This paves the way to an increasingly egalitarian way of being with one another.
A realist Utopia is a world of much more care, fairness and benefit for all, willingly and collectively created. Upwording lifts our thinking, quickly towards this desirable outcome. Upwording our everyday language will create more satisfied, invigorated and sustainable relationships, family lives, workplaces, societies, cultures; a desirable world for all.
14.00-15.00 CET | lunch break
15.00-17.00 CET | Workshop by Peter Pleyer
The famous object game or how to be creative together on zoom.
An introduction to the „object game“ by Susan Rethorst and the „Animating the News“ score by Simone Forti, adapted to play online. It is an improvisation where we will perform object-composition for each other in the frame of the camera, your desk or floor or kitchen table.
Please bring a mirror, 3 or 4 small objects (that may already be on your desk, floor, or kitchen table) and a current newspaper.
Programme Day 2
Saturday / Oct 17th
10.00-12.30 CET | Seminar & discussions
How to Understand Emotions, Bodies, and Minds in the Current State of Emergency?
Seminar of Karolina Wigura (sociologist) with intro lecture and time and space for conversation.
In recent years, citizens' fear, frustration and anger have been diagnosed in the context of exclusion from political decision-making processes, polarization of political pcenes, proliferation of populist practices in politics, new media, etc. Today a whole range of new emotions caused by the pandemic coronavirus is additionally shaping our lives. But what are citizens' emotions? How best to understand them? In my lecture, I propose to look at classical philosophical approaches, where emotions were considered to be a bridge between the mind and the body, an essential component not only of human nature, but also of good politics.
12.30-13.00 CET | Closing remarks
Closure/final remarks /thanks for the EDN Atelier.
Join also Grand re Union LIVE :
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81550399767?pwd=dzhrbHR4d1ZqWUFjdGZsRWQvaGJPQT09
From 14.00 CET: Workshop by Lea Keiffer
SCI FI ANATOMY
This workshop focuses on creating a dialogue between the matter of the body and the sea of our thoughts and imagination. Through movement, sounds and words. Working with casual epic-ness, craftsmanship of the body and magic.
A guided somatic trip where the content slides from anatomical references onto the slippery slope of science fiction with no holding back. We use bodywork and storytelling as tools to inspect our narratives of touch (what we touch, how we touch) and ways of imagining the body and physical sensations. Contradiction, otherness and diversity can cohabit, and our realities can melt, shape, reshape and melt again. If reality is a fiction, can we make our fictions a reality?
16.00-18.20 CET | The Reading Room
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84268632920?pwd=eXkreTFNS3pCTFlrMnBrb2F0Q2VHUT09
Agnes Benoit from „books on the move“ and Peter Pleyer invite you to a reading and listening room (Grand re Union LIVE). The zoom link will be shared shortly beforehand.
In the first part they will present and read from books that are meaningful to them, from the past and the present - for the future.
In the second part you are invited to share a reading from a book or a magazine with the group.
20.00-22.30 CET: the Grand re Union internal gathering
