Planetary Spaces: Wet Workshop

How can we better understand our relationship to the ocean floor, and what can it teach us about our chances for survival? Could a speculative inhabiting of the ocean floor open up new insights for the ways in which we relate with our surroundings? In order to address these questions from a coastless city like Giessen, this year’s Planetary Spaces fellow Juan Pablo Pacheco along with Bruno Alves de Almeida have come up with the idea of a wet workshop for his residency at the Panel, as an open space to expand how we relate to the multiple bodies of water within and around us. What happens when transdisciplinary conversations unfold in water, where our spatial coordinates are shuffled? Through this workshop, Pacheco will intra-act with a river, a lake, a pond, a pool, and an aquarium, through somatic reading and listening exercises and ask: how does water alter our conventional understanding of media, time, and space?

13:30 

|  Arrival & welcome at the Lahnfenster

14:00

|  Introductions, expectations, reader handout

15:00

|  Deep listening to planetary waters  

15:30

16:30

|  English tour of the Lahnfenster

|  Somatic readings & deep listening in/with/by/on the Lahn River

13:30 

|  Arrival at the Ocean2100 Aquarium

14:00

|  Meeting Dr. Patrick Schubert's research team at the Systematics & Biodiversity Lab

16:00

|  Somatic readings at Bergwerkswald and bomb crater ponds  

18:15

| "Water as an Engineered Planetary Space" lecture by Prof. Klement Tockner (Senckenberg Society), at Kunsthalle Gießen (hybrid event)

09:00 

|  Arrival at the indoor swimming pool at Ringallee 12

09:30

|  Somatic readings at/in/on indoor pool

12:00

|  Walk through the Schwanenteich park    

12:30

14:00

|  Lunch provided

|  Walk to the theater stage

14:30

|  Movement and deep listening with choreographer Catalina Insignares

Liquid tissues

Using the basis of sound as a frequency that vibrates into tissue, we will explore the flesh of bodies as liquid resonator. Contributing to the previous days of research with different bodies of water in Giessen guided by Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, we will dwell for a few hours in the body as water and thus pay attention to the movement that lies within and moves through it. Playful imaginaries and sounding throats will be the material of this part of the workshop.

Catalina Insignares is a Colombian choreographer and dancer based in Brussels. She’s interested in how to use the sensorial and fictional means of the body and of touch to develop ways to communicate with the invisible. Her practice includes, among others, a duet danced with a participant over a few weeks (us as a useless duet—2015), a night reading addressed to sleeping bodies (useless land—2017), and sensory practices that listen to the connections we have with the dead (landscapes of the dead – 2019; to know the vultures so well—2022). She works always in collaboration and long-term associations for choreography, dramaturgy, teaching and performance. Since 2015, she collaborates with Carolina Mendonça, maintaining close complicity in different manners of working together in: reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caress and massage populate these encounters. Since 2017, she has been working with Myriam Lefkowitz as a performer as well as in a collaboration that seeks to infiltrate sensory practices in the social and political realities of exiled people (La facultad—2017). From 2019 to 2022 Catalina developed her research as part of DAS THIRD in Amsterdam. Since 2019 she is a co-curator at the Gessnerallee in Zurich, where she developed the festival El Caldo and the curatorial program Discrete.