PRAXIS 2023

In the spring of 2023, the EKW was adapted to engage with the concerns of curators and art students at the masters level at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. As before, in this edition somatic and kinetic experimentation, theoretical readings, mapping and creative writing were part of the workshop. However, when engaging visual art students and emergent curators directly in sensorial explorations and embodied expression, the discussion prioritized perspectives on the body, movement, and affect present in performative practices and other art events. The workshop asked how different, and differently situated and abled bodies experience and negotiate embodied interaction with others, in space, with living beings, norms, personal habits, boundaries — discussing affecting the public, being affected and becoming.

The facilitation involved somatic and movement awareness and a critical discussion of the complex relationship many of us have with our ever changing and diverse bodies, and the histories the body carries. Framed as a space for gentle exploration, the workshop tried to ask questions addressing uncomfortable tensions that cross through our embodied existence in late capitalist societies and competitive knowledge economies. The workshop was thus considered particularly fruitful to think of critical and pedagogical interactions in art spaces, with audiences and artists alike.

At completion of the sessions, each student submitted a 4-page essay connecting the lived experience of selected embodied exercises with one or two of the texts discussed in class.