We worked within a highly structured series of exercises borrowed and amalgamated from Social Presencing Theatre, La Pocha Nostra, among other traditions, to locate counterknowledge in three ways, explained below.
First we asked our ‘intuition’ (also sometimes known as our assumptions) about another person as we stared in their eyes. If the other person was a plant, where would be their habitat? Then we asked the body to tell us about our experience of counterknowledge. If your experience of learning (outside of academic frameworks and capitalist modes of coerced productivity) was a sculpture you could make with your body, what does the body communicate?
Next we asked the non-human stuff all around us to show us what we needed to know. What kinds of under appreciated resources have answers in their very form that can answer some of our most difficult questions as we actually, not theoretically strive to become a vessel for counter knowledge? If we interviewed these forms all around us, what would they like in return?
Finally we asked the group itself, or the sculpture of energy formed by the group, if it could show us the counterknowledge. Can we tell a story, in the form of an exquisite corpse, that can reveal our path towards the unknown? This is when we became aware that we were studying (en)counter knowledge as the first step towards counter knowledge; that remaking relationships with all humans, as well as the non-human world, was our path, process and destination for counter knowledge.
- re-combine senses
- tune in and tune out
- be aware about your position if your you are in or out
- conscious step back
- failure and discomfortable knowledge
- Popping bubbles
- matter out of place
- transgression
- Stepping out of what is imposed as knowledge
- process based continuity
- constant questioning of obvious / opposition to what is given
- knowledge is fluid
- necessity to hit and break through boundaries
- to pass on
- how to break free?
- how to find the source of knowledge you actually need?
- knowledge is not classifiable/ rateable
- there is no right or wrong
- playful and pluralistic
- dynamic relation to the other person being or place and is in constant flux
- Being fine with not knowing
- deliberateling searching the unknown
- change the level of (becoming flat)
- learning
- go out of normal scenes routines
- relate
- humility of ‘our’
- unlearn and forget what we think we know
- not being
- satisfaction of the most
- loneliness, desire, courage and strength
Credits
This project was conceived at the MORE WORLD conference, October 2019, Berlin. All images (by Norman Posselt) and audios (by Andi Weiland) are CC BY 4.0.