Noticing ‘dead things’ in and around het Zonnehuis
By Valentina Curandi
Workshop Round 2 – Foyer | Outside
Language: English
Abstract
This workshop invites participants to explore how noticing what is present in and around us can shape how we relate to impermanence – how things change and come to an end. Through observing the surroundings, noting, writing, and conversation, participants will work with the language we use around death and notice what it carries. We will experiment with ways of describing what we see and associate with mortality. We let attention to what is silent and still, shift our ways of noticing. The workshop approaches artistic practice as a form of inquiry that is grounded in a specific place, offering a space to reflect and ask questions. By working with what is present, the workshop considers how we might speak about death with responsiveness.
What to expect:
We will walk through and around the Zonnehuis, looking for “dead things.” Returning to a shared space, participants will work in pairs, speaking and writing about what they noticed. We will compose short vignettes, share them with the group and reflect on what the language of stillness and silence could be about.
About the maker:
Valentina (she/her) is an artist working with performance, text, and cultural activities (i.e. reading groups). Her work investigates the relationships between bodies and languages, attending to the difficulty of articulating experiences that are both embodied and discursive—such as illness, mortality, and liminal states. She explores attentive, situated ways of articulating these experiences that hold both sensation and speech. In her PhD in Artistic Research (MERIAN Maastricht), she examines how relating to death and dying shapes artistic practice and its afterlife. Valentina is also training as a practitioner in holistic deathcare.