Categories: Workshop

Date: June 8th
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Ike Kamphof and Ruud Hendriks
Location: Misericordeplein, Maastricht
Language: English spoken

How can we attain knowledge of our bodily action and reflexes through the study of people who are extra sensitive to the wordless behavior of others? Ike Kamphof presents various possibilities of sensory existence and co-existence by exploring rhythms, mimetic mirroring and sensory details. These all play a large role in our daily, largely silent and subconscious interaction. Ruud Hendriks studies clowns specializing in dementia care, who seek to help people with this condition retain their sensory and emotional being in the world. He focuses on clowning as a technique to become extra-sensitive to the subtle, wordless expressions of persons with dementia. Training the Senses helps the clown go along with the patients and become attuned to their ways of being in the world. The clown also tries to find access to hidden capacities in people with dementia to stay sensitive and receptive to outside stimuli.

Date: May 11th
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Tim Ingold
Location: Van Eyck Academie, Academieplein 1, Maastricht
Language: English spoken

Tim Ingold’s wide-ranging studies encourage us to re-appreciate alternative knowledge or, put differently, things our bodies know but we do not always act upon, such as acquired skills, sudden reflexes and marked intuition. With a focus on alternative ways to find knowledge, Ingold offers imaginative workshop tutorials that include weaving baskets and flying kites with students. Tim Ingold’s writings cover themes as far apart as humans and animals, sensing, education, skill, perception, making, materials and becoming. His most recent book, The Life of Lines, is a wonderful example of his achievements and a poetic narrative that interlaces bodies, minds, landscapes, topographies and perceptions through a correspondence of lines.

Date: March 30th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Jenny Slatman and Kenneth Meijer
Location: Kunstkwartier 6211, Misericordeplein, Maastricht

The perception of heat, cold and pain, of being touched or moving our body, causes us to experience our bodies as inalienably ours. Yet other sensory experiences may cause us to suddenly perceive our body as strange and question the boundaries between our own and someone else’s body. Experiments demonstrate that we can easily fool ourselves into experiencing a fake hand as if it were part of our own body. Drawing on her own research, Jenny Slatman discusses various ways of experiencing one’s body, including illusionary ones, and explains them in terms of a dual sense of localization. Our embodied existence is open and confined at the same time because of its simultaneous being “here” and “there”. These concepts also provide input for new rehabilitation therapies. Kenneth Meijer presents some of the rehabilitation lessons learned at the new virtual reality lab(CAREN), where illusions are used to probe the human muscle-skeletal sensory system for basic research and diagnosis.

Date: 30 March
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Peter Klosse and Garmt Dijksterhuis
Location: Kunstkwartier 6211, Misericordeplein, Maastricht

We live in a time in which we have higher and higher expectations of our food. We expect to be able to eat everything all year round. Food stores and restaurants offer exquisite dishes, rare combinations and stunning flavors to satisfy our curiosity for new culinary adventures. To make all this possible, the agri-food industry is developing increasingly sophisticated techniques for processing our food. Often, this food has already undergone a series of treatments before reaching the final stage: the preparation, presentation and development of taste. Large food companies have taste laboratories where scientists work on specific properties, flavors, fragrances and colors of the food in order to provide the consumer with a maximum experience. Despite the growing demand for pure food, authentic recipes and real herbs, much of our food still has a manufactured taste. Peter Klosse, professor of Gastronomy and owner of the famous hotel-restaurant De Echoput near Apeldoorn, provides insight into the science behind taste. Garmt Dijksterhuis, who has a lot of experience in the field of food-related perceptual science in academia and industry, explains how taste is shaped by both the eaten and the eater.

Date: February 24th
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Anna Harris and Peggy Olislaegers
Location: Kunstkwartier 6211, Misericordeplein, Maastricht

All of our cognitive abilities have a recognizable source: language, mathematics, music, schooling in a pedagogical rhythm of small incremental steps. But how do we train our senses? One can argue that we see colors by following conventions about what is blue, red or green. We develop our taste by practicing and talking about flavors in tasting sessions of wine or olive oil. Senses are like crafts in that you can learn to master them only by practicing. And yet we cannot quite put our finger on where and how we learn with our bodies. Or can we? This session starts with a physical warm-up to stimulate the senses. Peggy Olislaegers talks about methods for exploring artistic questions physically and ways in which dancers archive their physical experiences. Anna Harris’ presentation deals with different resources we use to teach and learn sensory awareness in contemporary life, from cookbooks and wine tasting smelling kits to mindfulness workshops and the lessons that doctors learn to train their sensory skills of clinical examination.

Date: November 15th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: David Helbich and Rudi Laermans
Location: De Brandweer

How do we experience our body when we are at the theater, listen to a concert or attend a lecture? And how do we experience the entire body of an audience, in relation to ourselves and the work or the act? How do they all influence each other? We discipline ourselves, sit still, focus our hearing and view the performance. Yet, we are also distracted, fidgety, whispering to partners, and playing with candy wrappers. David Helbich’s long-term project Audience Observations plays with this interaction. By echoing this happenings, he demonstrates its performative qualities and thus ponders on the relationship between public spaces and audience participation.

Date: October 4th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Ana Tajadura-Jiménez and Paul Devens
Location: De Brandweer

Through our senses we form mental representations of our own body and the space and events around it. These mental representations have an impact on our emotional, social, and motor functioning. Ana Tajadura-Jiménez’s research focuses on showing that these mental representations are not fixed. Her project The Hearing Body investigates how sensory feedback changes people’s experiences of their body and the surrounding space. The project has shown that real-time alteration of walking sounds results in a changed perception of one’s represented body size, and contributes positively to a person’s walking behavior and emotional state. Sound artist Paul Devens is interested in ways in which sound conditions behave. He will offer an artistic interpretation of the subject with practical examples and sound experiments.

Date: September 20th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Roger Kneebone, Jozef Youssef and Dusia Kneebone
Location: De Brandweer

Touch and the ‘knowledge of the hand’ are essential to surgery, cooking, science and the arts. This interactive event will explore how experts from diverse backgrounds can share insights in unexpected ways. Roger Kneebone (surgeon and educator), Jozef Youssef (leading chef and gastronomic researcher) and Dusia Kneebone (marine geologist, art historian and hat maker) have been investigating how the culinary concept of ‘mise-en-place’ – how experts organise their work at the intersection between hands, tools and materials – can play out in different disciplines. They will illustrate some of the techniques they use, invite the audience to experience ‘hand knowledge’ and to contribute their own perspectives.

Datum: 3 mei
Tijd: 19:00 – 21:00 uur
Met: Natasha Myers, Espen Sommer Eide en Thought Collider
Locatie: De Brandweer

We denken doorgaans aan natuur als iets dat buiten onszelf ligt, als een brede verwevenheid van dingen die stilletjes onze acties en observaties ondergaan. Maar wat als we onszelf als onderdeel zien van een omgeving die ons ervaart, net zo goed als deze door ons wordt ervaren? Wetenschappers vinden steeds meer bewijs van communicatienetwerken – relaties tussen planten, dieren en mensen –  waarvan slechts enkelen van ons zich bewust zijn. Planten communiceren een aanval van rupsen aan andere planten, die daarop meteen chemisch verdedigingsgif produceren. Bomen communiceren met elkaar via hun wortels. Zelfs mensen lijken te communiceren in een zintuiglijke omgeving waaraan gelijktijdig ook planten en dieren deelnemen. Natasha Myers verkent de “affective ecologies” die vorm krijgen tussen planten en mensen. Espen Sommer Eide volgt het zintuiglijke gedrag van dieren. Thought Collider onderzoekt de relatie tussen geur en gedachteprocessen door moleculen te traceren die betrokken zijn bij de verspreiding van ziektes.

Date: June 21st
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Jamie Ward and Christine Söffing
Location: De Brandweer

People with synesthesia experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways. To some, each letter has its own distinct color; to others, images are directly related to taste, the sequence of numbers glide through space, or music is an animated spectacle. Scientists are struggling to find a good explanation for this mixing of the senses. This explanation may help for instance to discover in exploring ways in which blind people can be made to see again by using their other senses? In his research, Jamie Ward explores the workings of the synaesthetical mind and brain. Christine Söffing collects observations about synaesthesia and uses her own color-hearing-synesthesia and her color-scent synaesthesia for her work in experimental music and sound- and scent-installations.

Date: April 19th
Time: 7 – 8 PM
With: Sara Wookey
Location: Marres, House for Contemporary Culture

Movement is the primary sense with which we explore our environment and give meaning to it. Building on her 20-year long experience, American choreographer Sara Wookey will engage in a public dialogue about the ways in which dancers and choreographers can provide new perspectives on space and movement. Wookey’s presentation will focus on the experiential being in the museum and aspects of the social and spatial conditions her work approaches and tests out. In addition, she will do a short experiential movement exercise.

Date: March 30th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Gijs Frieling and Aukje Dekker
Location: Marres, Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht

Painting is such an obvious visual phenomenon that we rarely experience it as a call to sensory action. Instead of acting upon them, we read and try to understand paintings. We contemplate their themes and meanings. We discuss expression, gesture, emotion, and even the rules of representation. We don’t smell the paint, touch or lick it. We don’t allow our bodies to follow the brushstrokes. We rarely lie down and find new perspectives. We don’t imitate figures or animals in paintings. Paintings are thus radically emancipated from bodily movement or broad sensory perception. Why is that? Many will say that the body is not needed in the appreciation of painting. Today we are going to explore the opposite.

Date: November 14th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Saskia Wilson-Brown, Laura Speed and Emma Crebolder
Location: De Brandweer

Smells form part of our knowing, but they are elusive, often disappearing before they can be pinned down with speech. Scents can bring us strong memories of places and events, yet we find it hard to identify even quite strong smells, including bleach, rosemary and lavender. Research shows that people growing up in some non-western cultures have a more developed vocabulary for scents. And that Europeans find it easier to identify scents, the more they talk about these scents. What is it that makes scents so significant yet difficult to grasp? In this session, we will be identifying and expressing smells with director of the Institute for Art and Olfaction Saskia Wilson-Brown, reading about scent with poet Emma Crebolder and analyzing the relationship between smells and words with neuro-scientist Laura Speed.

Date: October 10th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Katja Heitmann
Location: De Brandweer

Our skin keeps us from seeping into the world. The skin holds our insides together, and stops the outside world from coming in. Even though we notice our skin only with damage or signs of age, it is a unique organ, a tender, stretchy, soft, and ultimately porous boundary. It is the elastic and adaptable place of encounter, a territory where the inner fluid breathing landscape of the bodyself meets the outer changeable environment that we share with other humans, animals, plants, rocks and water. We learn through cultural codes to conform and adapt our bodily experiences to what seems appropriate to specific situations. Katja Heitmann is interested in how to choreograph the skin. In this workshop, we will zoom into the skin as a physical element. What is the role of the skin for the body? What are the smallest movements underlying it?

Date: September 12th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Emilie Sitzia, Wiel Kusters, Joachim Junghanss and Kim Reijntjens
Location: De Brandweer

More than a lack of sound, silence can be meditative, transgressive, religious, bored, manipulative, rhythmical, reticent, aesthetic, respectful, rebellious and much more. In this workshop we will bring together a range of specialists to discuss and experiment with the audience their experience of silence. Drawing on various perspectives (such as philosophy, literature, visual arts, psychology, performance art, music, etc.) we will explore the impact of silence. We will test its boundaries, investigate its moods, and map its sensory forces in behavior, reflexes and sound.

Date: July 11th
Time: 6 – 8 PM
With: Joeri Bruyninckx, Kristen Haring and Ulrike Scholtes
Location: De Brandweer

Translation of experience into language is one of the most formidable challenges of learning. Thousands of cookbooks seem to explain how to prepare exquisite meals. Yet, their success greatly depends on the author’s resourcefulness in finding a language that makes readers understand exactly how to handle kitchen equipment, apply cutting techniques, make their timing precise and know what it is they should taste. By focusing on how sensory vocabularies are shared, and how sensory experience is recorded, this session on fieldnotes targets some of these large gaps in our understanding about learning. How do we record observations, share them with others and acquire a skill? This session explores techniques of recording and coding the sensory ranging from tracking bird sounds, drawing yoga positions to knitting in morse code.

Date: June 13th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Mami Izumi and Emmanuelle Wackerle
Location: De Brandweer

Much of human movement is on foot. We need our body to bring us to work, school and the supermarket. But there is also a long tradition that relates walking to thought. The peripatetic school in ancient Greece derived its name from its habit to converse while walking, and Kant’s daily tour became famous as ‘the philopher’s walk.’ Robert Walser presented his walking as a philosophical object, Baudelaire invented ‘the flaneur’ and Stanley Brouwn turned walking into art. More than the simple body movement of shifting our weight from one foot to another to move forward, walking, then, is a tool to create, reflect and meditate. But how do our predispositions, handicaps and environment influence our sensory perception to bring about this contemplative shift?

Date: May 23rd
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: archigraphus
Location: De Brandweer

What is space? We all have a conception of it, but if we compare notes, everyone views it differently. We perceive space usually as the volume that surrounds us. We have ways of looking at specific spaces, whose boundaries we can mark visually: a rectangular room, a round hall, a small gallery. And we have a general concept about space with psychological qualities: breathing space, space of movement. We think of spaces as comfortable, haunting, hollow, warm or smelly. And some of them we sense to be unwelcoming and eerie. Today’s session with archigraphus is aimed at our awareness of all these routines, feelings, and intuitions of space. How do we perceive space and what vocabulary do we use to measure and map it? This will be a thoroughly practical workshop: we’re going to walk, do exercises, execute commissions, and share footage of unknown perspectives: watch, taste and imagine space!

Date: April 25th
Time: 7 – 9 PM
With: Roderik Povel, Bernadette Jansma and Poetry Slammers: Loukia Hadjiyianni, Charis Hoffman, Sophie Malon and Alfie Marsden Smedley
Location: De Brandweer

The voice is our most formidable instrument for expression. The voice speaks, sings, moans, coughs, stammers, hesitates, recites, and sneezes. It helps us to communicate ideas, connect to other people, vent our moods and enthusiasms, sing songs, recite poetry, and command armies. Yet, even though the voice is an unquestioned instrument with which we express our identity, it seems also alien to us. We listen to our own recorded voice as if it belongs to another person. We can hear voices of people that are absent. Unsuspected things can cause us to have a failing voice, one that stammers, falls silent, or is temporarily lost. With help of poetry slammers, a jazz vocalist and a neurologist, we will explore in this event the ways in which our voices constantly mediate between our inner selves and the external world.