2023: Becoming sensitive research instruments, Studium Generale Wageningen

In this workshop, we explored different ways of becoming aware of our body within the context of doing scientific research. Working around three topics – ‘The body relating to space’, ‘The body relating to objects’ and ‘The body relating to other ([more-than]human) bodies’ – we experimented with different exercises to become body aware and to investigate what it means to “practice” a body when practicing science. In what ways do bodies come into being in our scientific practices? What if we think about our bodies as our most important research instruments? How can we be more aware of specificities of this instrument? What sensitivities do the spaces, objects and subjects we work with ask or afford for? We investigated these and more questions through moving, relating, documenting and reflecting. 

2023: The Bodies that We Become, Plenary Session, Studium Generale Wageningen 

A plenary session for the festival “The Bodies that We Become” which facilitated different workshops about the role of the body in scientific research. During this plenary session, participants investigated how to harvest from the awareness of their bodies (and their relationality, entanglements etc) produced by the varying sessions and performances of the festival. Which specific lessons can the sciences learn from this? What are the bodies we want to have, be and do as science practitioners. What bodies could we become? Offering different kinds of prompt, this session helped participants articulate thoughts in ways that are grounded in and draw on the embodied practices presented throughout the evening. 

2023: Symposium for the senses

2022: Writing Sensitivities, with Ruth Benschop, for DIS_SEMINAR, kunst=onderzoek

For artistic research, writing is not always a suitable medium for dissemination. During this day, which celebrates other and alternative dissemination forms, this workshop aims to explore what writing can do for our artistic research processes. Specifically, we experiment with ways of sensitive writing. We exercise writing techniques that make us feel our bodies, make us attentive to our surroundings, and we work with the idea of attuning our writing to what it is that we research. Unpacking “writing”, we open the discussion about prevailing sensitivities around writing as dissemination form and method for artistic research and make more specific which ways of writing do and do not work for us and in what ways. 

2022 - now: BODY WORK for Interdisciplinary Artists 

For the bachelor interdisciplinary arts (iArts) Maastricht, I developed body work as a Home-Based-Learning course. Together with Nina Willem I developed a line for the first two bachelor years, in ways that make body work a subject to come home to and a base of knowledge and skills that can enact all the different subjects and projects students are engaging with. 

Photo from iArts website ZUYD

2022-2024: Embodied Methods Guest Lectures/workshop

In these workshops (for e.g., UvA anthropology bachelor and master and HKU) students learn to become aware of their body as a research instrument. We work with different forms of body work to become aware of the materiality of our individual body, our relatedness to space and how we enact and are enacted by objects. We also work with different forms of documentation. All of these experiments will foster awareness of the specificities of our bodies/research instruments and the research we (want to) do. How can we calibrate our instruments in ways that allow for sensitivity to and attunement with our research subjects?

2022: BODILY KNOWLEDGE Audio Tour, Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht

In this audio tour, visitors are guided through the Bonnefanten Museum, learning different ways to feel their body. The tour explores ways in which they can use their body to experience the museum and some of its art works specifically. In contrast to most guided tours, this tour does not go into the meaning of the art work, the story the work tells, the symbols presented. It does not invite the listener to think about why this work is here and what makes it art. It does not go into craftsmanship, history, style, genre or contemplate art in any other way. This tour invites the visitor to experience the work using body awareness. 

Photo by Manor Lux

2022: WRITING MATTERS workshop, with Ruth Benschop: Writing Matters, MUSTS conference: science, technology and the non-human

In this workshop we will first invite participants to experiment with and write about the material conditions under and about which we write. Secondly, we will fold meaning and see what happens. The workshop focuses on writing practices during research processes and aims to explore and open up ways of sensitizing ourselves to and with materiality by writing. 

2022 - 2024: FEELING SCIENCE" honours module, UvA

In the common understanding of science, scientific practice is often framed as data collection, the systematic analysis of data, development of scientific models and theory, all with the goal of objectively and factually representing reality. Similarly, in the classical philosophy of science, the results of research activities are viewed as objective and disembodied. What is underrepresented in such views on scientific practices are the ways in which the body of the scientist plays a role in these practices. In recent research, the scientist’s body becomes a research instrument, also actively involved in research practices.  If the scientists’ bodies are indeed involved in research practices in various ways, a lot of new questions arise. For example: in what ways may a scientist’s body be involved in research practices and what does it mean for scientific validity that different scientists have different modes of embodiment and embodied experiences? Or: what role do bodies, affects and emotions play when scientists - with different disciplinary backgrounds - collaborate? What implications does embodied scientific research practice have for research ethics or the way we communicate scientific results? Could we develop tools that help us engage with and include our embodiment productively in the different phases of our research practices so as to do good science? 

2017-2020: BODILY KNOWLEDGE workshop (Theater Academy Maastricht)

In this workshop we will learn about sensory knowledge by doing sensory knowledge. Through different kinds of exercises that originate in different fields -such as somatics, butoh, mime and meditation- we will sensitize ourselves in different ways. By reflecting on what and how we sense, we work on developing our ability to articulate and to experience subtleties in sensations. We use the metaphor of the artistic researcher as an instrument to reflect on the role of bodily knowledge in our artistic research and explore how our research practices afford for and produce specific sensitive bodies.  

2020: DRAWING SPACIAL AND BODILY SENSITIVITIES – the training kit, with Marlies Vermeulen, 4S/EASST conference 

Ways in which bodies and spaces relate have gained increasing acknowledgement, interest and dedication in various sciences such as sociology, anthropology, science studies and artistic research (often under big words such as “affects” or “affordances”). Drawing on the material-semiotic proposition that bodies and spaces do not only relate, but co-produce each other, this workshop offers practical tools to become sensitive to and articulate body-space entanglements. It introduces drawing as an ethnographic technique to study bodies in spaces. 

2020 - now: The body as research instrument - Bachelor Course for Iarts Maastricht 

As artists, we are social beings whose knowledge and skills depends on the way in which we engage with our environments. Hence, our work, processes, thoughts, sensitivities and ideas should not be considered as isolated, but as highly situated. Therefore, we can benefit from becoming aware of our specific way of engaging with the world. This training works with the assumption that the way in which we move through, relate to and attune ourselves to our environment depends on the way in which we use our body. When performing our (artistic) practices, we always use our bodies (in certain ways and in others not). Hence, in order to sensitize and attune ourselves to our practice’s needs, we train our body awareness. During the sessions we will explore our body as an “instrument”. Each student, each artist, each researcher is, has and does a unique instrument with which they sense, attune to and relate to the world. Our bodies are our means through which we gather and process information, move through our environments and produce work. In short: not only is our body always there with us; it is the very medium we do our work with. Therefore, we will work on becoming aware of our instrument, learning about its specificities, how we attune it to and how it is affected by our surroundings. We work on “calibrating” our instrument to the practices we perform, the spaces we move through and the contexts we work in. Because these sessions combine bodywork with documentation and reflection, students develop both intuitive and sensitive as well as analytical and reflective skills. 

2019: SENSITIVITIES AT (FIELD)WORK Short Intensive Course University of Amsterdam 

This edition of the body awareness short intensive course for social science PhD’s was more specifically focused on doing fieldwork and its sensitivities. “Fields” (places, people, practices and so on) have a lot of things to offer to those researching them. For fieldworkers the body becomes an instrument, sensitivities become ways of knowing the field. However, being sensitive requires practice. How can we sensitize, calibrate, and care for our instrument so that it operates in the field in such way that is productive to our research and also to ourselves? When and how does our work require attentiveness? When and how should we be open to our environments? How to remain sensitive to one’s own body, its boundaries and needs, in surroundings that may be overwhelming? How do different notation techniques hone different sensitivities for events, practices, bodies? 

2018: SENSITIVITY AS RESEARCH SKILL at LEARNING/TEACHING MATERIALS: A SKILLSHARE WORKSHOP (Making Clinical Sense Research Team and Marres Maastricht) 

In several short interventions and through various techniques, we approached feeling the body as a skill. We looked at multiple relations of feeling and thinking and how thinking can be a technique to foster feeling and vice versa. We explored how feeling our bodies can help us (as researchers, thinkers, academics) think, write and work. 

2018: BODY WORKS FOR “TALKING MINDS” Short Intensive Course University of Amsterdam 

Academic education trains us to write sharp arguments, to read attentively, to relate to other’s words, to prepare engaging classes or original conference papers. What is strangely absent when being prepared for all these different tasks, is how to use our bodies. Doing “quiet, sitting bodies, separated from each other, concentrated on producing and perceiving discourses, not paying attention to other sensations and activities in themselves as in other bodies” (as Carozzi describes academic bodies in Talking minds: The scholastic construction of incorporeal discourse, 2005) is a useful or even necessary practice in certain stages of academic work. However, other ways of being attentive may be required while being in the field, teaching a class or presenting a paper at conferences. How to be more aware of one’s physicality, presence, our relation to our surroundings and other bodies? How to become more attentive to our bodies and individual specificities? How to perform bodies differently in various contexts? This Short Intensive Course is aimed at making these questions present in our academic lives and provide tools to perform aware and attentive academic bodies. 

2018: BODY AWARENESS for VGCT Conference on psyche and soma “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano” 

Four short sessions, each with a different focus, named WAKKER (for a fresh mind and an active body), LEKKER (a back-care session), BEELD (on images and imagination as constructive techniques for healthy alignment) and HUID (about the skin as an arbitrary boundary between ourselves and our environments). 

2020-now: BODILY KNOWLEDGE seminar – an exploration of thinking through feeling (Theater Academy Maastricht)

In my research I study the practices and methods used by professionals that sensitize bodies, such as somatic therapists, yoga teachers, butoh dancers or haptonomists. They are professionals of what I call “feeling techniques”; ways of using the body that both require and enhance sensitivity. Throughout their work they use words, images and other sensory media in order to invite, guide, provoke, stimulate, activate or articulate feelings. Using language, thoughts, ideas and concepts, they access the realm of feelings, a realm that is often considered “implicit” or “non-representational”. Doing so they break through a number of dualisms such as thinking and feeling, sensitivity and knowledge, body and mind. In this seminar we explored how words and drawings produce bodily sensitivity and ways in which thinking and feeling interrelate. During the first part of the day, we practiced examples of feeling techniques (a set of bodily exercises accessible for any bodily ability). In the second part we experimented with ways in which feeling techniques may become tools to write, talk, draw, perform, move or think. In light of these explorations, we thought about how we can train our own specific version of “bodily knowledge”, using feeling techniques ourselves, within our own (professional) practices

2018-2022: Organization of Walking Seminars, UvA

Monthly seminars, hosted by Annemarie Mol, during which we talk-walk about various issues concerning academic work. The idea is that talking-while-walling enhances thinking in ways not attainable behind a desk or in a seminar sitting down. 

2017: TOUCH SEMINAR

Intervision seminar for experts from different fields who touch people as part of their professional practice. Movement teachers, physical therapists, massage therapists, dancers and anyone who professionally touches people where invited and gathered to exchange thoughts, experiences and techniques.

2016: BODY AWARENESS at Innovation Art Education conference Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design

Through accessible exercises we practiced body and social awareness. We experimented with techniques that make us aware of the way we affect and are affected by a group or collective. Deriving from the assumption that art teachers in-the-making have to learn to tell stories, we researched how we can affect an audience and create collective sensory experiences. 

2016-2018: Out-of-your-mindfulness

A cheeky homage to mindfulness, with similar intensions, yet requiring and evoking a completely different attitude. Like mindfulness the goals are to establish a non-judgmental and open attitude, be able to escape from the bustle in the head, break patterns and reduce stress. It addresses topics such as dealing with obstacles, living in the so called ‘here and now’, creating the conditions and mind-set to let this happen, practicing trust and confidence and dealing with thoughts and ways to communicate. Where mindfulness accounts for patience, caution, modesty, stillness and peacefulness, out-of-your-mindfulness is playful, confronting, breaks through comfort zones, awakens creativities and imaginations, prevents seriousness and invites ridiculousness.

2015-2019: Op het matje bij Ulrike

Ongoing Yoga classes, massage therapy and other body work that takes place on "mats" in the broadest sense of the word. Besides sessions and classes in my home-studio, yoga studios and gyms, I also worked for yoga-retreats, mindfulness-retreats and a retreat for people with cancer and their care-givers. 

2015-2016: Working-out

Outdoor body workshop with walking, yoga and eating that explores ways of being outside: outside the house, outside the city, outside the head and outside some versions of our so-called "selves". 

2015: MOVEMENT INTRODUCTION, Network meeting Rijkswaterstaat 

A movement intervention based solely on walking in circles and spirals with the intension to set a tone of togetherness in the introduction of a co-creation day for 200 Rijkswaterstaat employees from different sectors. The emphasis was to give each participant the feeling of what it means to be part of a whole and to enact and be enacted by it. Moving as one and being aware of ones own particular place and space within this massive body consisting of 200 individual, yet not separated parts. 

Playful intervention at Magneet Festival Amsterdam (2015).

Festival-goers are invited for a real-life bord game and to incorporate their favorite or most feared fairytale characters. Performances, consisting of movement, theater, singing, dancing and more, are rated by an audience and decides the player's progression in the game. 

2015-2016: Child-parent movement interventions and workshops

Build around the intension to have children and parents move around in each others imaginations. Exploring unrealistic worlds, forgetting about what makes sense and taking turn in deciding the game rules of their imaginative worlds, children and adults move together and forget about their usual roles, rules and norms.

2015-2017: Movement at work / Office Yoga

Short movement interventions (from methods like yoga, Pilates, somatics and physical therapy) in offices that do not require props, special clothing or abilities, but that do intervene with chronic postures and patterns and address all body parts, movement directions and planes of movement. 

2015: Experimenting with "red" at the Stedelijk Museum

What happens to the way we experience colour when we sensitize our body through yoga? A yoga practice in front of  Barnett Newman's "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue".