Location: Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam
Duration: 3 hours
Students: BFA2 in New Earth, Cultural Diversity and Power Play study areas for Social Practices minor study programme
Workshop facilitators: Sumia Jaama and Michelle Teran
Description:
Mending and Dreaming, Questionnaire on the Body is a workshop exploring the physical and spiritual relationship to the body, its surroundings, and the different ways it moves through and experiences the world. Through movement exercises, collective reading, discussion, and writing, participants reflect on embodiment, proximity, memory, and care as shared social and pedagogical practices.
The workshop included movement-based exercises, an introduction to key glossary terms aligned with socially engaged art and art education, and a questionnaire framed as a message to one’s future self. Participants collectively read the Social Practices (A)Positional Paper, a collaboratively written text by tutors and practitioners within the Social Practices programme at Willem de Kooning Academy that reflects on collective learning, care, situated knowledge, and experimental pedagogies.
Participants then discussed selected sections in smaller groups and were invited to propose adjacent readings to the text and to suggest alternate terms they felt connected to or that expanded upon the glossary terms introduced by the workshop facilitators. The session was guided by values of openness, flexibility, patience, and a willingness to think collectively rather than individually.
