The Embodied Knowledge Workshop
Embodied Knowledge is a workshop exploring the role of the body in creative practice, knowledge production, and personal experience. We will meet for 3 weekends in August at Kutomo to explore embodied experiments as a form of personal and collective research, and discuss how our embodied life affects our thoughts about the world and other bodies and creatures in it. How does the body shape our actions and interactions with the planet and with communities? The binaries of intellect-emotion, nature-culture, spontaneity-technique, freedom-conditioning will be discussed in critical texts and examined through somatics, experimental writing, and mapping experiments.
Who can join: Adults, no previous experience in art is needed. Only willingness to explore bodily in a safe way with others, and to discuss openly and kindly. Registration is free. Sessions are conducted in English.
Where: Kutomo, Kalastajankatu 1 B.
Method: a blend between seminar, personal retreat, and movement practice
Duration: 28 hs contact teaching + 15 hs independent study (readings)
Schedule: Full day sessions with a lunch break, except for the third weekend, where we will work only in the afternoons.
Weekend 1:
Sat 3.8. at 9-16
Sun 4.8. at 10-15
Weekend 2:
Sat 17.8. at 9-16
Sun 18.8. at 10-15
Weekend 3:
Sat 31.8. at 13-17:30
Sun 1.9. at 13-17:30
Registration: please fill in your personal information and tell us about your motivation and interest in joining this practice HERE, by June 15th 2024. Registration is free of cost, but for best collective and personal results, we also ask your commitment for the full duration of the sessions. Participants (max 20) will be selected based on motivation statements. Application deadline is June 15th. Selection of participants is announced in early July.
Facilitator: María Villa
The Embodied Knowledge Workshop
This workshop explores the role of the body in creative practice, knowledge production, and personal experience. It proposes embodied experiments as a form of personal and collective research, and discusses how bodily experimentation features in varied disciplines and contexts. How does our embodied life affect our thoughts about the world and other bodies in it? How does it shape our actions and interactions with communities?
The workshop has an intersectional and ecological orientation to these practices, while also providing a rich space for personal exploration. The binaries of intellect-emotion, nature-culture, spontaneity-technique, freedom-conditioning will be discussed in critical texts and examined through an ecology of practices: somatic exercises, movement, experimental writing, poetic improvisation, and mapping.
The workshop also investigates how different, and differently situated and abled bodies experience and negotiate interaction with others. How does our bodily experience shape our relations to norms, spaces, habits, aging, our perception and our connection with non-human creatures?
The workshop aims to be a safe (but also brave) space for exploration, helping participants get familiar with varied approaches to embodiment and engage in somatic and movement awareness. No level of bodily skills or previous experience in dance or performance practices is required.
The workshop includes a few lectures and requires weekly readings. These will help deepen our conversation on dualist conceptions on the body, knowledge, and practice we grew up with, and present alternatives to redefine or rethink them in a relational and situated manner. We operate with safer spaces guidelines.
What you need to bring:
Wear comfortable clothes to move, a bottle of water, and your lunch or any snacks. Kutomo is unfortunately not accessible to wheelchair users. For more information or any special accommodations you might need, do not hesitate to contact María at laboratorio.mediacion@gmail.com
María Villa is an independent curator, educator, and researcher based in Finland. She is the co-curator for New Performance Turku Biennale and works in the intersections of contemporary arts feminist ecologies, and varied communities. In 2019 she created the Embodied Knowledge Workshop as part of her research on experimental practices and critical pedagogies within intersectional activism. The workshop has been implemented in Helsinki several times since. María has focussed in the last decade on designing spaces for discussion, collaboration, and social sustainability with participatory art methods. She currently teaches creative writing in the Art and Media MA at Aalto University.
In collaboration with Ehkä-production & Contemporary Art Space Kutomo