Members of School of Apocalypse would be thrilled to join OpenCare at the OpenVillage Festival – we believe we walking a parallel path … here’s a bit on what we could offer:
Title
Here you Are: How to Experience Your Body in Space
Abstract
How do we come to understand space through bodily experiences? How does the environment we build shape the way we feel and interact? This interactive session explores the ways that architecture shapes our physical, social, emotional bodies. In offering a series of exercises designed to help us reclaim our right to behave and move freely in the spaces we inhabit, this work aims to innovate the vocabulary for embodied architecture that sensitize us to our surroundings.
About School of Apocalypse
School of Apocalypse (SoA) examines the connections between creative practice and notions of survival. In light of growing cultural, ecological and technological phenomena that challenge basic assumptions about human existence, SoA offers courses and programming that seek to develop new modes of inquiry and apply broader levels of experience to intellectual investigation. SoA has no fixed definition of survival, but engages with the fundamental questions that the themes provoke. We understand the creative potential of a school to be a space in which shared experience generates deeper insights and can lead to alternative cultural systems. The school invites a range of thinkers, artists and scientists to present programming on related themes. Subjects of study are theoretical as well as hands on, and emphasize the integration of observational and material practices found in mystical traditions, creative modalities and scientific field work.
Workshop Description
Space has a strong impact on the ways our bodies move. It’s design is rarely arbitrary, and yet its power over us so often remains invisible. The presenters offer a series of instructions to explore any space with our bodies in order not to fall victim to mindless obedience within it. The group has produced a soundtrack and manual that can be used by anyone at anytime to investigate the ways in which architecture and the environment influence the body and vice versa. Expanding the vocabulary used to describe this experience can then enable us to have productive conversations about the power of our surroundings and designing to optimize agency.
This session explores different ways of learning, helping participants widen their awareness and expand their openness to the inputs of the world around us. The body is an exceptional vessel to receive and inform the wisdoms of space.
Participant Engagement
Workshop participants will have the opportunity to engage both mentally and physically throughout the session. The workshop is constructed in three parts. In part one, the presenters will introducing the goal of the group’s work - to better understand and more actively engage with the ways that space impacts the body, and vice versa. The facilitators will provide context and case studies for the this research, and will then share their research methodology. Part two will give workshop participants the opportunity to enact the research. A fifteen- or thirty-minute audio piece will guide the workshop facilitators and participants alike through a series of prompts and sounds which will expose the ways in which the space that contains this very workshop provides the groundwork for certain kinds of thought patterns, behaviors, and experiences. (Here is the link to a 5-minute version of the audio piece: Stream Bodies Intersect Buildings music | Listen to songs, albums, playlists for free on SoundCloud). During part three, participants will discuss the ways in which the soundtrack, and the ideas presented over the course of the workshop, were and were not effective in growing awareness and interest in sensitizing their given professional fields to the body. All participants will leave the workshop with a manual entitled “Here You Are: How to Experience Your Body in Space.”
Till soon!
Eugenia Manwelyan
Choreographer, Ecologist, Founding Faculty of School of Apocalypse