This project-week is an intensive five-day module in which Marisa Godoy (dance practitioner-researcher), introduces her proposals for a full-term collaboration with students of the MA Transdisciplinarity Studies (open also for students of other disciplines), during her artist residency at ZHdK in the autumn term 2023. Marisa Godoy will facilitate the lab in collaboration with transdisciplinary artist Eirini Sourgiadaki and the dance collective The Field. This module proposes a space of artistic investigation and production with a focus on collective modes of being and operating. The proposal includes the opportunity to delve further into collectivity across the autumn term through participation in monthly Saturday labs.

During five days, the lab proposes embodied practices aiming to facilitate generative modes of working that are key to creative practices across the disciplines. Amongst the competences the lab aims to facilitate are an enhanced perception of the interplay between self, other and surrounding; sensitise the bodymind as we interact with one another and engage with materials and spatiotemporal elements; responsiveness to various approaches in generative modes of working; a finer sense of relationalitiy; improved awareness/responsiveness in collaborative and collective processes; distributed accountability. One key aim is to enable participants to channel this experience to their own creative language, media and/or field. The practices are designed with a view to enable artists from a variety of domains to benefit from embodied approaches. No previous experience with movement practices or techniques is required.

The activities will take place indoors as well as outdoors. The sessions are facilitated in practices that embrace each person’s sensitivities and artistic language, while being essentially collective. 

The main focus of this project-week is the exploration of modes of working implicated in collective creation: conviviality, co-research, collaboration, collectivity, co-presence, co-authorship, and other commonalities. Through embodied practices based on nonlinear approaches to our organism and to modes of perception, thought and action, we will start up by sensitising the bodymind to its intricate network of connections, to then intensify perceptions of its relationship with other and environment. Grounded on the notion of the indivisibility of the human organism and its immersion in the surrounding environment, the practices transit through materialities/immaterialities in explorations that embrace living and non-living beings. 

The interconnections, and consequent communication processes within bodymind, and of the bodymind with its environment take place by means of uninterrupted exchange through biological as well as sensorimotor perceptions. As we engage with various circumstances related to collective work, we will learn how to set intentions and operate in the group. We will intentionally attend to the multidimensional web of internal and external cues that we continuously refer to and negotiate with as we navigate the world. We will draw on movement-based practices, somatic principles, meditation practice and, coupled with theoretical references from performing art and anthropological studies.

Each artist is encouraged to bring in their current research interests and desires, or delineate an inquiry during the five-day lab. The week will evolve supported by a longstanding artistic practice and also by modes of working developed in the day-to-day life of being a collective whose core structure is non-hierarchical. Operating as an artist collective implies a wide variety of actions/motions of a creative but also administrative and logistic nature. Unforeseen challenges, accomplished projects, failed attempts, speculations, positive irritations (and also rather uncomfortable ones), and delicious interactions are inherent in collective work – some of it unavoidable and most of it generative.