Kafkárna
Kafkárna
CZ/EN
Center for Art and Ecology UMPRUM Centrum pro umění a ekologii UMPRUM
Center for Art
and Ecology UMPRUM

Sophie Seita – ‘plant-like, wave-like, rock-like’: some messy proposals for hands-on listening

How do we listen with our hands? Do our feet have ears or lungs? Can a leaf or stalk or pebble become an extension of our body? We will follow some simple listening prompts and performance scores as forms of attunement to our own bodies, each other, and the environment we find ourselves in, and we will then develop our own scores in response to our embodied experience. We will perform ‘thinking-in-movement’, we will gather materials and consider gathering a form of collective authorship, and we will develop a new lexicon for the internal and external landscapes thus gathered. The workshop will offer you insights from sensory, ethnography, queer studies, disability studies, and performance studies, emphasising touch, play, curiosity, not-knowing, and situated knowledge.

Download PDF

Sophie Seita

Sophie Seita

Sophie Seita is an artist and researcher whose expanded language- and performance works negotiate the presence or absence of the body or voice, and treat any material as a surface for inscription or occasion for listening. Committed to this exploratory sense of languaging, Seita often uses somatic workshops and other forms of gathering within her artistic research. Recently this took the form of a participatory interspecies performance score commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art, co-developed with Youngsook Choi, Rike Scheffler, and Jae-Lee Kim. Consistent with Seita’s interest in the provisional, ambiguous, and sensorially attuned beyond neuro-normative structures of sense-making or bodily habit, this publication is an invitation to practise forms of encounter energised by curiosity, surprise, and play. Seita teaches at Goldsmiths, and recently held residencies with Studio Voltaire (London) and Khata Maysternya (Ukraine). Their installation ‘the swamp under the forum’ is currently on view at Akademie der Künste, Berlin.