Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/01/2020
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location
Witten/Herdecke University
Category(ies)
- Dance
- Film
- Conversation
- Literature
- Discussion
- Music
- Theatre
- Visual Arts
- Multimedia
- Avant-Garde
- Talk
- Conference
- Culture
- Improvisation
- International
- Premiere
- Workshop
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The Global Social Witnessing Conference.Lab 2020 will provide a space where diverse perspectives/experiences from artists, scientists, spiritual practitioners, and political activists will inspire participants to better understand and embody GSW within their mind, heart, and body.
- Shelley Sacks: “Landing Strip for Souls”
Landing Strip for Souls is a participatory social sculpture process for ‘activating the inner field’ and exploring the driving forces – past, present and future – in ones life and in the wider field. It puts the short interval we have on the planet in an experiential and global perspective. Through engaging in it, participants experience two of the social sculpture root methods: the “Inner Atelier” process and ‘active listening’. These methods help one to access and amplify the ‘Richtkrafte’ or ‘guiding forces’ in relation to individual, generational and global situations and to listen to what is calling one, individually and collectively, from the future. It also gives participants a direct experience of different modes of thinking and thinking-together, including Joseph Beuys’s emphasis on ‘imaginal thought’ and Goethe’s ‘intuitive thinking’. This “making social honey” process designed by Shelley Sacks is offered by the University of the Trees: Lab for New Knowledge and an Eco-Social Future as a stand-alone practice and as part of intensive social sculpture programs.
- Ilene Wasserman: “Global Social Witnessing: emerging communication perspective”
We are all part of the energetic fields of larger systems. The communication perspective helps us to look AT the contexts and stories we swim in, in order to make mindful about our next move, and to best co-create how we go on together.
Barnett Pearce (2005) speaks about our forms of communication with a developmental construct: from self to more complex forms of systems: Our forms of communication are subject to an evolution towards complexity and inclusivity, from monocultural and ethnocentric towards modernistic and cosmopolitan communication.
This evolutionary process is massively counteracted by unprocessed collective traumata which lead to the formation of highly polarized narratives and to the fixation of communication on an ethnocentric level.
Kegan and Lahey (2000) pose the question: What forms transform?
Our session will explore embodied approaches to looking at what we create together in our patterns of relating and how, how we tune into self and other and each other with resonance, dissonance, pairs and circles in our structured enactments, we can transcend trauma to create new patterns for going on together.
- Kerstin Schubert-Strauß: “3 Sync – Express your inner world”
Ich möchte einen sicheren Raum schaffen um die Prozesse der Teilnehmer zu begleiten und zu unterstützen. Was passiert in mir wenn ich eine Ereignis bezeuge, was spüre ich in meinem Körper, was fühle ich und was denke ich?
3 Sync = spüren, fühlen, denken
Gemeinsam betrachten wir ein Bild das ein aktuelles Ereignis zeigt. Danach kann jeder Teilnehmer künstlerisch, durch malen oder zeichnen, ausdrücken was er im Körper empfindet, was er fühlt und was er denkt. (Im Anschluss erforschen wir ob und was der Prozess des künstlerischen Ausdrucks mit dem Bezeugen gemacht hat.)
I would like to create a safe space to accompany and support the process of the participants.
What happens to me when I witness an event, what do I feel in my body, what emotions and what thoughts occur?
3 Sync = Sense, Feel, Think.
Together we look at a picture of a current event. Afterwards each participant can paint or draw what he senses in his body, what he feels and which thoughts occur.
- Daniel Auf der Mauer: “The Embodied Witness: Photography and Videography as an Empathic Relational Interface to Trauma and Conflict”
Photography and videography are powerful relational interfaces and central mediators for Global Social Witnessing. They serve as a gateway between the world “out there” and the viewer’s experience “in here”. In this workshop, we will explore photography as an interpersonal ritual for connection and revelation and examine its relational principles and infrastructure in theory and through practical group exercises. Drawing from 15 years of experience in documenting conflict, Daniel will demonstrate live how the development of a strong personal witnessing capacity is central to unlocking the full relational bandwidth of photography and videography. If a photographer is unable to inclusively integrate what he or she is witnessing, the resulting overwhelm and dissociation is reflected in the images and relational access to the documented trauma is inhibited. Finally, we will view selected images and short excerpts of video documentaries and practice actual collective presencing and global social witnessing as a group.
- Stephanie Miracle: “Eye as a Camera: a moving meditation on sight, the body and the environment”
How can we witness our world with greater intention? How can our eyes lead us towards compassion and empathy? How can our bodies lead up towards a keener sense of sight? This workshop will explore the relationship between the sight and site – our vision and the places we inhabit through our own physical bodies. Using practices derived the language of film and choreography, we will create movement scores that heighten our senses and better position us within the environment. As a group, we will work with embodied assignments that move us through indoor and outdoor spaces and together we will create radical, physical acts of witnessing. By emphasizing how we see what we see, we can move into a amplified state of awareness to the world around us that present the possibility of empathy. All levels of movers welcome.
- Werner Vogd: “Global Witnessing under the perspective of James Dow’s Theory of Symbolic Healing”
The anthropologist James Dow has developed a theory of symbolic healing which claims to show cross-cultural patterns of healing, therapy and trauma processing. In this workshop, we will first present Dow’s approach in its basic outlines, and then in a second step try to apply it to the experiences, processes and solutions that have emerged during the previous days in the Global Social Witnessing Lab.
- Ingrid Pickel: “The responsive body – giving GSW a voice through movements”
The practice of GSW requires a sensory awareness and processing quality that enables us to create an inner world space. A good awareness of and rootedness in our bodymind seems therefore crucial. This workshop proposes meditational and playful scores that enable us to enlarge our space and capacity to resonate. The scores invite us to sense inner movements and microphenomenological gestures as a resonance to outer movements and events. By letting these movements flow into outer expression, they become tangible. Moment to moment we can experience their changing nature and the shifting of perspectives. Step by step we increase our capacity to contain complex realities.
The body has a wisdom which connects us to the past and to the future. Together we explore the responsive body and possibilities of an emerging we-space. We feel the subtle web of connection between us and give GSW a voice that can be heard, seen and felt.
- Clara Perinchery and Axel Perinchery: “The Citizen is Present – Global Social Witnessing in public places and global hot spots”
In October 2018 Axel initiated with his wife Clara and his friends Martin Bruders and Gary Joplin the social art performance: “The Citizen is Present”.
Inspired by the performance artist Marina Abramovic they are practicing Global Social Witnessing in contact with the citizens in order to explore what impact presence has on public places. After 1 year it has become a growing movement and it happened already in 29 cities. The last action took place at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Madrid 2019.
Clara and Axel will present this project and this specific practice of social witnessing which includes: self awareness, relational competence and space consciousness.
This workshop will give you the opportunity to have a direct experience of the deep personal and societal impact of this practice and to get an inspiration on how a spontaneous idea can become a social movement.
- Mette Boell: “Compassionate systems leadership for an uncertain future”
Our time is marked by great disruptions, or VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity). Be it the ecological, social, or financial system – crises in one domain will be closely intertwined with the others. We as a global society seem unequipped to deal with the complexity of systems breakdown – our changing climate case and point. The compassionate systems approach to leadership is anchored in cultivation of the mind/heart/body system, the social-relational system and the larger ecosystems of society and nature with an understanding of the profound interconnectedness of all three domains with a direct, hands-on focus on how we individually and collectively may face the global challenges in a more generative way. During the session, we will focus on the leadership required when pressure increases and there are no easy fixes and no instant escapes from our habitual emotional reactions based on fear, anger and sadness. We will look at how we tend to lose track of the more subtle elements which influence the situations as a whole and on a number of inner qualities and practical skills that leaders can cultivate in order to become a source of effective and compassionate responsibility for oneself, others, and the system at large.
- Elizabeth Debold and Thomas Steininger: “What is Sacred Activism? – Practices for Global Wholeness in a Time of Division”
In this workshop, Elizabeth Debold and Thomas Steininger will open up a collaborative inquiry with participants into the intersection of activism and consciousness development, social change and spiritual transformation. Together, we will explore this intersection by investigating different practices such as post-oppositional engagement, bearing witness, and practices of emergence, guided by the voices of indigenous spiritual leaders and activists from their One World in Dialogue projects. This session will be conducted using emergent dialogue, which in itself connects consciousness development and action.
Join us at the Global Social Witnessing_Conference.Lab 2020 in Witten/Herdecke University!