AWARENESS, VISUAL ART & SPT
a prototypeLAB exploring Aesthetic Knowing
Organized and facilitated by
Ninni Sødahl & Agathe Peltereau-Villeneuve
Ninni and Agathe held an experimental workshop in Paris on December 3rd and 4th, supported by Anne-Sophie Dubanton. The invitation was to explore the emergence of experience and of knowing through Visual practices, with the support of awareness and SPT practices.
Ninni has been developing these Visual Awareness practices over decades from her art-based creative capacities, meditation training and sustainable co-creation. Over the past few years, further framings of this work have been developed in collaboration with fellow SPT colleague Siv Helene Stangeland.
Ninni and Agathe met in Denmark during the three years SPT masterclass that ran from 2014 to 2016. They share a deep interested in the Arts, for SPT, and for the phenomena of experience and consciousness and the emergence of knowing through sensory activity. studioLAB | sensing paradigm shifts – an impromptu aesthetic and awareness journey they developed during Covid together with Andrea Chlopczik and Michael Stubberup, is an example of this shared interest. They both also trained in microphenomenology with Claire Petitmengin, a student and colleague of the late neuroscientist Francisco Varela. It is a method by which to explore and attempt to trace the emergence of experience in all its rich, subtle and subconscious layers.
The first day of the Aesthetic Knowing LAB focused on the individual experience of inner connection, the process of emergence and building the capacity of ‘staying with not knowing’. On the second day, the practices gradually moved towards the complexity of resonance with the social space and the collective body, journeying from ego to eco.
As a general note, after these two days the 15 participants all felt deepened and magnified, more alive. A few of us felt challenged, because more in touch with aspects of human experience we had been somewhat avoiding, or judging.
One month after the Aesthetic Knowing LAB, Agathe notices that this combination of visual, embodied and awareness practices – in service of exploring the nature of individual and collective experience and the emergence of knowing, and applied with care in a safe environment –, has had lasting effects on her felt state of openness. The experience seems to have contributed in intensifying her perception of the aesthetic nature of life, and clarified the path to opening to the unknown and the uneasy.
Anne-Sophie mentions the deep sense of Beauty that lives in her.
Regarding the inherent connection between the individual and the collective nature of human experience, and a pathway to its improvement, after the LAB Julie Musialek, one of the participants, wrote to us, “An aspect of the individual drawing I found very interesting is the capacity to open the dream vision, the capacity to envision what would life call for if this was the best in me, as Ninni asked. I am not familiar with Theory U but, I guess that this is what is at stake as well, on a collective level.”
At this point, more testimonies and feedbacks need to be gathered from the participants to draw a fuller landscape of individual and collective experiences, learnings and potentials that have been emerging from the prototypeLAB.
Deepening this work and interest, by specifically connecting Awareness training, Contemplative Visual art and Social Presencing Theater, has been very inspiring and invites for more writings and further laboratory workshops.
A next workshop in Paris is scheduled to the Fall 2024. Stay tuned!
For further information or dialogues, you are welcome to reach out!
From the INVITE to the Prototype Workshop | December 2022:
AESTHETIC KNOWING | a prototype workshop exploring the dialogue between Visual Art, Social Presencing Theater and Awareness Practices as capacities for Sustainable Systems Transformation.
Our intention is to create a space to explore and deepen the ‘knowing’ which is embedded in engaging in the creativity as such and connect to the embodied intuitive sense of ‘what feels right/true’. Acknowledging being part of a Living system at large, listening into the dynamics and fabric of the inner and outer system, we will introduce ways to hold complexity, sensing into resonance and staying with the ‘not knowing’.
Creativity is like finding myself and loosing myself at the same time.
Saul William, American poet
We offer this proposition based on the intuition that the social arts (ie arts by all, and in service of the evolution of what we-co-create, systems, situations, etc) are able to reveal hidden qualities and dynamics of our systems. They open a subtle research space where hindrances and forces of the systems/situations can engage in a fertile and transformative dialogue.
True creation must arise from mu-shin, the state of ’no-mind’, a state beyond thoughts, emotions and expectations.
Nishida Kitarõ, Zen philosopher 1870-1945
The invitation is using aesthetic and art-based approaches to re-connect our sense of being part of The Living System at large and building the capacity to shift ‘from ego to eco awareness’.
The practices will invite us to:
– connect to our inner wisdom
– see and sense the situations we live and our co-created systems
– explore the invisible relational field that exist in all systems
– develop an action confidence that opens to Life enhancing directions and perspectives