Vivien Tauchmann

Self As Other
2021 – ongoing

Embodiment as practice beyond relational spheres.

In today's world, where capitalist exhaustion, alienation, and exploitation continue to be pervasive, understanding and navigating complex relational spheres and power dynamics is crucial for art and design students to understand and ideally resist the complicity of their fields. The workshop offers the opportunity to delve into these intricate structures through an embodied lense, utilising the body as both a tool and a medium for research and reflection.

The workshop invites participants to explore practices of kinaesthetic empathy as applied tools for dissecting and reflecting on relational spheres and power relations. In building a collective and safe space through artistic as well as bodily experimentation participants investigate, how the body functions as a tool for reflection in various diametric spaces such as the political and personal or the collective and individual. Through bodily exercises and performative research methodologies, they explore the potentiality and limits of kinaesthetic empathy by experimenting with interventions of the body as a materiality. By observing, analysing and describing the choreographies of specific situations, where complex social relations and power dynamics intersect, they experiment with the design of performative and experiential settings discuss their application outside of the classroom, in order to explore and rethink structures of social and political relations.