Vivien Tauchmann

Solidarity is a verb.
2021

Solidarity is a verb. But what do we act out?

In ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, Paulo Freire writes, that “Solidarity requires that one enters into the situation of those with whom one is in solidarity [and] means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality.”

But what happens, if this relation is disturbed or becomes ungraspable due to an increasing scale, as in the construction of collective forms of identification, the formulation of a “North” or a “South”, oppressor and oppressed, “we” and “them”?

The workshop critically investigates and reflects on ‘doing solidarity’ through practices of embodiment and kinaesthetic empathy. Participants are invited to build a collective and safe space to explore, how the body functions as a tool for reflection, political and personal, collective and individual. Through bodily exercises and performative research methodologies, they deconstruct complexities by looking at the everyday and mundane, in order to explore and rethink structures of social relations.

The workshop took place as part of DESIGN CAMPUS 2021 at Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden. The result was the collective performance “Excavating the Family Tree of the Invisible”.