The Embodied Knowledge Bureau is a space for investigating, reclaiming, and engaging the body within artistic education. Participants will dwell within an interdisciplinary community of practitioners and scholars, both in Amsterdam and internationally, who work through embodied approaches to knowledge and learning. The course will integrate movement and somatic workshops, open discussions, lectures, and film screenings that seek to mend current disciplinary blindspots and language barriers that often exist between academics and experiential experts.
Our program emerges out of a longing to mesh fields typically deemed separate — to grant access to knowledge which is too often confined to specific institutional frameworks. We believe that the body’s flesh, bone, and cellular structures archive crucial knowledge and embed both personal and collective histories which can absolutely be drawn on within artistic practice and research.
When dominant educational theories, pedagogical practices, and institutional structures omit the body, can somatic literacy serve as a tipping point for transformation? In a cultural, economic, and technological climate that increasingly addresses subjects as disembodied brains, what unique forms of expression, sense-making, and knowledge-sharing can embodied awareness uncover?
The Embodied Knowledge Bureau targets visual and spatial makers interested in exploring the impact of embodied experience on our ways of thinking, creating, and understanding our surroundings. We welcome participants at different stages of practice, movement experience, physical abilities, and a wide variety of interests. We are excited about weaving an inter-departmental community around topics which may often seem intimidating, inaccessible, or simply unaffordable.
The Embodied Knowledge Bureau firmly encourages participants to experiment with their own embodied expressions, languages, and styles. The program is designed to balance theory and experience, in order to allow participants ample space for reflection on the impact of their experiences on individual practices and interests. Throughout the year we will introduce an array of practices and techniques, as well as visual and written tools for describing and reflecting on these experiences. Together we will “read through the body,” using a sketchbook or body journal to document our insights and personal research. Selections of these materials will be published in the Embodied Learning Lexicon, an A-Z lexicon that will embody the terminologies and experiences that arise during the program.
We are excited to return after summer break with a 2-part Digestive Writing Workshop, hosted by Micaela at AnaMorphic Studio.
Meeting over two weeks will open possibilities to deepen and practice the scores within your own flow: especially for those who are currently developing a piece of text or working to frame an area of research. This will be a space for individual inquiry within a larger group process.
We will be hosting a temporary field school for adults and children, filled with guided sensory field trips in and around Hasselt. Together, we will explore our surroundings from multiple viewpoints.
Digestive Writing Scores is wandering out of university walls and into the studio. From April, Micaela Terk will be offering two sessions each month at AnaMorphic Studio in OT301.
In this somatic writing workshop, we will experiment with relationships between words and knowledge. Writing through different movement scores, we will form a collective research lexicon that looks to disrupt common pathways and form new gestures. Movement will be the modus operandi in our choreographic exploration of learning environments.
This session will focus on corporeal literacy: what it might be, how to theorize it, and what it may help to understand.
Have you ever noticed your own pace while moving? In this workshop we will be focusing on slow body movement, as guided by voice-over instruction and video. The session is divided in a variety of sections, in which I will encourage executing different actions involving balance, focus and collaboration. The workshop is constructed as an open playground/game and is a part of a bigger project I am currently developing.
14:30 – 17:30 @ FL101
14:30-17:30 @ FL101 — The Pantarei method is shaped around the innate human qualities of empathy, touch, and communication — grounded in a need for connection and a powerful capacity for self-healing. In this one hour skillshare workshop, we’ll explore some fun and effective ways to get (re)connected to individual strengths and abilities through bodily awareness. We will work through a combination of touch and verbal communication, as powerful tools for tuning into desires, knowledge, and creativity, exploring how these tools can help towards personal expression and interpersonal communication.
Please wear something comfortable that you can easily move in, ideally clothing which are not too tight or thick-layered so that others can touch you and you can touch others.
A lecture/workshop on seeing and the body as a cognitive tool.
As part of W139 hosts… the Embodied Knowledge Bureau invites you to a night session at W139, around Jack Walsh’s documentary film, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer.
14:30 – 17:30
Theory Room 1
10:00-17:30 in FedLev 101
Movement workshop with Aitana Cordero: Aequilibria
Friday, January 14 / 14:00-19:00*
Where: Zoom (link will be provided closer to date)
This will be a hybrid event, limited to up to 30 physical participants.
14:30 location TBA
In this class we explore the different flavours of our energetic body. Exploring how it is connected to our physical, emotional, mental and subtle body. Tapping into a deeper understanding of who and what we are. Gaining the tools to flow, contain and activate more easily
Embodying personal space, interpersonal space, social space & shifting in between
Time: 14:30–17:30
Location: BC 416
Join us on Friday, October 15 from 14:30-17:30 in FL101 (above the theory stairs) for a welcome session, where we will introduce the program and answer any questions about expectations, applications, attendance, etc. If time allows, we will experiment with some of the basic terms and concepts that will accompany the course.
The Embodied Knowledge Bureau is a space for investigating, reclaiming, and engaging the body within artistic education. Participants will dwell within an interdisciplinary community of practitioners and scholars, both in Amsterdam and internationally, who work through embodied approaches to knowledge and learning. The extraintra platform will integrate movement and somatic workshops, open discussions, lectures, and film screenings that seek to mend current disciplinary blindspots and language barriers that often exist between academics and experiential experts.
Micaela Terk (Sandberg Instituut, Design Department)
Sheona Turnbull (Sandberg Instituut, Design Department)
Yotam Shibolet (PhD Researcher & Lecturer at Utrecht University, Department of Media and Culture)
2021
https://www.instagram.com/embodiedknowledgebureau/ & https://embodiedknowledgebureau.goodbyebooks.org/
14:30 – 17:30 @ FL101
About the session
Currently I am writing about the ceramic process and its relations with my body and land; the qualities of movement that clay imprints in my body, and its effects in my nervous system, while I am shaping or transforming it. There is another layer of relation that I am researching, which is the relation between my body and land through clay (that is always site specific and is an extraction practice), now crossed by this context of migration. I would like to share some of my findings with you all. However, since my main interest with this research is developing this type of work with clay as a facilitation tool, I would like even more to actually research this along with you. For our time together I invite you to move along with clay and share some of your experience with me and the group.
About Lina
Lina Bravo Mora is a student of the temporary program, Ecologies of Transformation at Sandberg. She comes from Bogotá, Colombia in the highlands of the tropical Andes. She is a 32 years old, queer, feminist anthropologist, educator, and ceramic artist. Before coming to the Netherlands she worked as a conflict transformation facilitator through storytelling and clay, mainly with groups of kids and women. In her work and thinking, Lina advocates for decoloniality of knowledge. As a Latin american, mestiza feminist, she is constantly digging and learning and being questioned by the intersectionality and complexity of that context, and by her privileged position in it. For more, see Lina's website: https://linabravomora.com/
Accessibility
Working with clay may get a bit messy, so bring clothes that can get dirty and that you feel super comfortable moving in (mud will come off after washing). Your hands will get very dry after this work. I will bring some almond oil, but if you have delicate skin bring your own hand cream. We will work on the floor and also there will be some tables in the space, it all depends on how you like moving. There will also be some chairs available.
We have planned enough time to be together, to be able to enjoy the time expansion that working with clay offers, and talso to take care of the space and clean it after we are done working. Please keep in mind that this is also a fundamental part of this work :)
If you have access needs don't hesitate to share them with us.
Also, if you have some clay around your house or studio, please bring it! The more the better!
This session is closed to the core group only, there is a limit of 10 spots. To reserve yours, please send an email to: embodiedknowledgebureau@sandberg.nl
