Self-As-Other-Trainings
2018-

“Self-As-Other-Trainings” is an ongoing research project into an embodied pedagogy that confronts the relational aspects of human-made infrastructures. The series of choreographed trainings lead participants into physical acts of empathy. Through audio-visual storylines of simple repetitive gestures, accompanied by audio pieces and motion guidance, the trainings move between action & reflection, exposing imperialist white supremacist capitalist* power relations at the scale of the human.

Through the active embodiment, participants experience a state of an ‘other’, not by having to know them personally, but through a mimetic register. By conveying intersecting structures of oppression by means of body motion, the experiences seek to center the subaltern and invisible, and question notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In this sense, the trainings are a plea to open and change perspectives by means of our body. By challenging it, the trainings attempt to question internalised behaviours, provoke self-reflection and potentially change perceptions of privileges and acting in solidarity. Understanding the body as mouldable material, a tool for (un-)learning, the experiences move beyond simplifications of Western rationality, where the body is positioned below reason.

The existing trainings amplify a range of oppressive intersections of labour, capitalist production and exploitation. They have been part of exhibitions, public interventions, protests, civil society summits and workshops in collaboration with cultural spaces as well as workers’ rights initiatives.

*referring here to bell hooks and the term she coined:
imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy

Motion sequence, Self-As-Other-Training: Textiles.

Functional diagram of Self-As-Other-Trainings.


Self-As-Other-Training:Textiles, preview.


Self-As-Other-Training: Textiles, at 4th Istanbul Design Biennial: A School of Schools, 2018.

Self-As-Other-Training: Greenhouse, MU Artspace Eindhoven, 2019.

Self-As-Other-Training: Textiles, Bauhaus Study Rooms – Design Acts, Bauhaus Dessau,
©️ (Gropius, Walter) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023 / photo: Yvonne Tenschert, 2023.

Self-As-Other-Trainings online, Stay LIVE at Home!, Performistanbul, Istanbul, 2020.


Self-As-Other-Trainings, at the new local - Precarious Pavillions #2 in Brussels, 2018.

 

Selected activations: