All Labs in the RAPP Lab project encourage perspectives through which students and teachers find creative answers to their future role in society. To strengthen the students’ capacity to think “out of the box” and to find own their profile as artists influences their employability. In this specific Lab on embodied reflective practices, we aimed to analyze which role the bodily perceptions have for this individual and manifold process while “becoming an artist”.
Leaving the comfort zone
Acting with their bodies (e.g. to look or behave “strangely”) invites students to lose their hidden assumptions, how they “should” have acted accordingly to trained codes or learned techniques. This continuous stepping out of the comfort zone can be regarded as a social learning process, in which the “normal” can be critically questioned. The Lab community offered a context in which the questioning of the so-called “normal” can be experienced in a collective and participative way.
Backwards instead of forwards
In the very original sense of reflection as leaning backwards to oneself we regard the awareness of bodily perceptions and bodily sensitivities as a basic competence. In connection with the term research (lat. ricercare), we propose an understanding of searching back, to search backward, to search behind ones back, or to search our way back to something. We might also emphasise the connection to “seek for” from Latin “cercare” which also means to wander and to traverse also in a circle; we want to provide spaces in which it is not only ok to walk in circles, but positively welcome.
Bending back while so much in our current social and political situation is about moving (quickly) forward. Because reflection takes time and requires a slowing down, a particular mode of attention … To get intense with something.