RESEARCH / CREATION
LABORATORIES
Presenting the 2025 - 2026 TEMENOS fellows, and their proposed R/C laboratories.
SHARED LABS
Here you will (soon) find descriptions of the practices that we have developed and practice together. There is a constant balance between forging shared instruments and working on our own individual grounds. This equilibrium between together and apart is vital to stay tune both to one another, as well as the space of collective happening.
Practices include (details will arrive soon) :
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Storytelling/Narrative Research
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A circular practice to contact our voice of inner-most desire so that it may be realized fully in a shared imaginal realm.
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Time-Travel Interventions
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Wild play (and disruption) in the causal chain.
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Material-Poetics (Meaning-Making with Matter)
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Cultivating attention to cues in the environment and physical world as gateways of insight.
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"The Team"
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Working with historical, cultural, spiritual, symbolic and imaginary personas and Icons in order to access their specific states and qualities.
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The Oscillation & The Alignment (Radical Creation)
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Theory & Method to train integrative inquiry (the alignment of all capacities towards a similar point-of-devotion, guidance or vision) >> the work towards coherence; and the extension into group synchronization.
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Art as the Science of Freedom
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Unusually-choreographed dinner parties, happenings, adventures, propositions, play; encouraging the space of possibility in both subtle and outrageous experimentation.
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The Monastic Lab (developed in collaboration with Kitty Munichs & Babet te Winkel)
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a proposed frame for being alone together - that is, a structure that protects individual concentration in devoted work, while providing a path for sharing, support, and feedback (inspired by monastic rhythm as it corresponds to individual and collective prayer.)
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WORLDWIDE
ELI GOLD
Simply put, the things I love:
things that fascinate, impassion and entrance me.
A mixture of momentary fixations and life-long obsession and recently-arrived companions of wonderment.
These laboratories (containers of encounter, discovery and experimentation) might also be understood as temples, for each introduces a possible point of access, a place of intimacy between soul and substance.
You will notice, though - there are very few tangible and concrete elements in the documents that follow.
(I am a bodily being, but this space here is dedicated to the ideas and language that tickle me into aliveness.)
Please know that above/beyond these intellectual confluences - I also adore : improvisational cooking, wild seaweed harvesting, sensation & touch, reveling together in obscene and nearly-unbearable levels of beauty (permanently available in the world-as-it-is with the right set of eyes, of course), kindness, listening, warmth.... and I have an indulgent relationship with collecting marvelous objects, like stones, books, icons, keys, colors, sounds and smells.
I am also ripe and receptive to open all taboo topics in exchange or creative work. I gladly invite exploration of subjects often unwelcome elsewhere - not from a stance of provocation, but rather to provide these social exiles a refuge and the respect they deserve. Sex, death, food, war, money, illness, grief, shame, pleasure, faith, desire ... see more about taboos here.
What you will find here (below) is something more like a conceptual map. Just bathe in the language. It’s a river. Not a schematic. Let it in and see which words want to make a home in you. This is a splash-pool of my passion. Please, run around in it. Get wet.
As for the concrete work: I practice through writing (poetry, essays, ir/reverent “sermons”), drawing/painting, performance, video, interactive media, collage, interviews, pilgrimage, storytelling, archetypal analysis, crafting of workshops, and designing of co-creative processes and spaces.
I also believe that daily life and unframed contact participate, too, as grounds of creation. Life-creation. Every encounter presents an opportunity to be with any of these realms-of-inquiry: the Temple Labs.
For more about Eli - visit the CORE TEAM page.
Note : MythOS and Creators+Creatures are research paths developed and nourished together with Radu.
( click to expand )
RADU LAZAR
Hi! Welcome to the c.universe.3 !
My world. All that I love and cultivate.
The Logical: the principles I hold as true.
The Metaphysical: the fictional spaces and devices I care for.
The Physical: the projects and the research labs I am dedicated to.
(Most of them are developed together with Eli.)
Here you can find some maps to help you orient in this world:
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The first image is the way my human identity, Radu, shows a metaphorical form of my true being (the
faculties of my spirit, RA) and the three realms.
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The second image is a tree-diagram of all the content.
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The third image is a diagram with the 10 Laws. These laws are the truths guiding me in the way I shape my reality. They are intuited by the spirit and the mind, but they become physical if life is truly, radically shaped and shared according to them. (The physical, the objective is distinct from mind only by being established by habit.)
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The fourth image is a representation of the Metaphysical Realm. This is a fictional reality developed within the Narrative Lab. It is cultivated through various contemplative practices and is meant to be integrated with the shared life at La Source, in order to produce a model of non-dual existence, a life in which there is coherence between the deepest spiritual truths and all the other dimensions of existence:emotion, sensation, thought, action, perception, etc.
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The fifth image is a representation of the concrete forms of research, creation that I love, I am dedicated to and wish to invite others in.
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DOCUMENTS
This is a set of documents in which you will find a more comprehensive description of the vision, the three realms, the laws, the purposes, the spaces, the functions, the methods, the practices, the tools, etc.
DOCUMENTs & VIDEOs :
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The LOGICAL
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The METAPHYSICAL
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The PHYSICAL
Georgii ‘Gosha’ Elaev is a transdisciplinary artist, born in 1988 in an Irtysh ski village in a family of Buryad origins. He studied journalism, contemporary art and critical theory and is working with performance, moving image, drawing and sound.
GOSHA ELAEV
During the fellowship I am planning to work on a transdisciplinary project focusing on several themes:
life in displacement, interconnected relationships and the complexity of love. My working process will include regular bodywork sessions and hosting a performance laboratory, collecting daily diary drawings and writings, assembling a sound instrument using recycled materials and developing a narrative focused on establishing a new life in a new place during the crisis. After an extended period of exile, I am focused on creating a space for myself and for my love to grow, flourish and thrive.
To describe the method of approach to my tasks, I’d like to cite Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Carrier bag theory of fiction, 'when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand’.
HELENA SIEBORGS
Helena Sieborgs is a Belgian artist working with light-sensitive plant materials, memory, and place. Her practice draws on historical and ecological processes to create fragile, time-bound images - often anthotypes and chlorophyll prints. She explores nature not only as subject, but as medium, archive, and co-creator.
Echoes of Living Light
My artistic practice emerges at the intersection of ecology, memory, and elemental time. I work with anthotypes, chlorophyll printing, and other plant-based photographic processes that use sunlight, plant matter, and water as co-authors. I am interested in nature not just as image, but as medium, partner, and witness.
My work listens to fragile, invisible or overlooked processes - photosynthesis, decomposition, soft decay, forgotten herbs once used in healing. I consider these processes part of a wider archive of ecological intelligence, held not in text but in life itself. What I hope to explore in TEMENOS is how image-making can become a form of atunement. A listening. A way to slow down and receive the unseen: the marks of time on a leaf, the fading of a print, the echo of a plant that once held breath.
This work is not clean or controlled. It stains. It fades. It collaborates. In this way it is closer to life than to representation. It is also deeply relational, both in its materials and in the way it invites others to experience temporality, tenderness, and the poetics of disappearance.
Alongside open-air photographic processes, I also wish to explore ecological image-making within a darkroom setting. This includes salt printing, cyanotypes, and creating my own developers using local plant material, sometimes even pine needles or tree bark. I’m particularly interested in experimenting with natural pigments and botanical extracts to influence the development of film and prints, treating the image as something both chemical and alive.
If feasible, I would like to further develop the idea of an anthotype or ecological pigment garden on-site, a living archive where plants for printmaking and photographic research can be grown, harvested, and exchanged. Specifically for the area of La Source, I’m intrigued by the potential of working with local mosses, lichens, and seaweed from the coast. These organisms might not only yield new image-making possibilities but also help develop a visual language rooted in the terroir itself.
As an integral part of my living inquiry, I also carry with me a deep engagement with music. I study classical violin and hope to continue this at TEMENOS, ideally in dialogue with local musicians and folk traditions. I see music as another form of resonance with place and presence, and as a counterbalance to the silent, fading nature of photographic time.
At TEMENOS, I hope to open this space of research not as a fixed method, but as a living inquiry:
Can photography become a form of love, a contact with the Other that leaves a trace, however delicate?
Can process itself be the message?
Can the image breathe?
PETRI LEHTINEN
Petri Lehtinen grew up on an island off the coast of the city of Turku, Finland. There were few kids to play with but Petri seldom felt lonely because he had a good imagination. He was also assertive in his quest to find friends playing in bands and in the theater. Directing plays became his profession. Petri Lehtinen loved his job, maybe with a little too much passion.
Lehtinen burnt out and found himself in New York City where he invented Ishmail Sandstroem, his visual arts project. The name functioned first as Lehtinen’s artist name, a mask in a ”give-me-a-mask-and-I-will-tell-you-the-truth” kind of way before becoming a title for project-specific interdisciplinary collectives. As far as Petri Lehtinen may stray from directing plays, all he ever does is direct plays. Petri Lehtinen likes to call himself "Ishmail Sandstroem’s curator".
I never graduated from the Theater Academy because the idea of writing the required final thesis about myself as a theater director (with three and a half productions under my belt) felt ludicrous. All I wanted was to become the director I knew I am by directing.
The title of my thesis ”Order and Mess” is still an apt title for my art, not only as a theater director I was then, but also re: the multidisciplinary artist that I’ve become. My aim is to create order in which it’s safe to let go of it so that a secret order within the disorder may unfold. I like to end up creating something I could not have ever imagined, because it connects me to a place that’s beyond my imagination.
In my personal laboratory I consider myself a student of alchemy, if you will. What it is that turns trash into treasure, transforms this broken mess into a whole? Precious questions as the gaps between worlds are growing wider: How to help worlds meet more, collide less? How to understand and be understood? How to translate the untranslatable? How to build bridges taking advantage of our differences instead of trying to force us to be the same?
In my art I transform what makes me uncomfortable, anxious, angry or afraid into something that doesn’t. I create beauty without dismissing what is ugly. I want the whole picture. I create light mandalas from implements I use to manage my diabetes. Ishmail Sandstroem Mandala is a particular way of making mandalas — a mandala brand, a school, a sect, if you
will. It is a physical, mental, and social process that transforms former trash into present day treasure, a work of art. Since 2021 I’ve been creating Mandala Duets with fellow artists.
Mandala Duet is a creative act between two individuals. I aim to build the core of my artistic practice — the double helix of the DNA, if you will — at La Source around the mandala. I’d like to create one mandala every month of the residency with willing fellow artists and others. The process is improvisatory, intimate, ever changing and infinitely intriguing.
I see Mandala Duets as an opportunity to open up the creative process for a larger audience. I would like to document the creative acts on video, combining time lapse, artist dialogue, interviews. For this I seek help from another artist, maybe one of the fellows of the fellowship? Even though I’ve been filed under ”multidisciplinary artist” by grant institutions in Finland, I am notoriously bad in multitasking. And: to play well, I need others to play with. I liken my core competence to that of fascia. Fascia is the connective tissue, the invisible web that links different parts of the human body from the tip of the toes to the top of the head. ”The fascia’s job is to hold the body together and generate force in the desired direction” (Aaro Huttunen: The Role and Function of the Fascia).
Mandala XXVII (2023); Metti Nordin & Petri Lehtinen
Recycled diabetes paraphernalia (insulin pen needles and needle caps, inner components of an insulin pen, sterile blood lancets, blood sugar tester screens), recycled plexiglass, LED lights, paper, Pinewood box (design & carpentry Janne Lehtovirta); 75 cm x 75 cm, depth 8 cm
THOMAS
LAMPION
Thomas Lampion was born in the small town of Hot Springs, North Carolina and attended University of the Arts in Philadelphia and graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. His first graphic novel, a memoir called 'The Burning Hotels' was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Single Issue in 2020. He is currently at work on his second graphic novel, a work of fiction.
Thomas Lampion is an impassioned lover of film and is known for his encyclopedic knowledge of various titles, genres, and history of the medium that often becomes a reference point in several of his works.
Philosophically, I wish to explore the inner dynamics of family and how they shape us into the human beings we become. I am in a deep state of love that has been allotted to me through therapy, healing past trauma, and my partner, who inspires me every single day.
The book I am presently developing is my gift to the women of my family (especially my mother), for all they have suffered, and all the dreams that were never fulfilled because of the times they lived in. Together with the other fellows, I wish to explore the matter of love and its many complicated facets of expression in the form of family, to use fiction to explore inner family dynamics, their patterns, and how they often repeat themselves, even without anyone ever knowing.
The group sessions will focus on philosophical components of 'the family' throughout not just art and literature, but through personal input gained from lived experience with their own familial backgrounds. What exactly is a family? Are we shaped into who we are because of family or despite them? What part does love ultimately play in the role of the family and when can that be misconstrued or misunderstood?
LIES VERSWIJVEL
Lies Verwijvel is an artist and death doula whose work centers around imagination, be/longing, and impermanence. Her work aims to be a sanctuary—tangible or intangible—where the tender and hidden parts of life can be held. She is drawn to in-between spaces, the nature of crisis, and the raw beauty within them that teaches us presence and the magic of things. Inspired by the more-than-human world, discomfort, and the energetic textures of space, story, and sound, she explores the intimate relationship with the unseen and the living world as an expansive body of self.
I move through the world guided by questions and curiosity, not to seek answers, but to follow the threads they reveal. My central inquiry is the ecology of endings: what do we lose when we pathologize crisis, grief, and death instead of recognizing them as initiatory? How might thresholds become communal cornerstones that hold us in the dark long enough for its intelligence to emerge?
In this I am drawn to the practice of keening, not only as a way our bones give voice to mourning, but for its catalyzing quality. In keening, voice, vibration, and noise become bridges, living entities that move, and move us. I believe external catalysts, human or more-than-human, are essential for initiation. The beauty and vitality stored within pain often remain hidden, not because they are unreachable, but because we are not met there. Neglect, rupture, and disconnection keep us from that threshold, and thus from initiation. We need others / or otherness / not only as companions, but as bridges and witnesses. This is why I see keening and lamenting not only as release, but as relational invocation. Which connects to another strand of my inquiry: word, story, and sound—not as messages, but as portals. I am less interested in communicating a point than in creating a field—through rhythm, vibration, silence, and intention, and through the subtle architectures that hold these acts: This is the unseen grammar of presence, and it is at the center of everything I do: to make the invisible feel safe enough to join the interaction.
Alongside the above, I am working on a project with my collective, IJLLAND, together with Patricia Vanneste. For a couple of years, we’ve been exploring landscape psychology, listening to how outer geographies mirror inner climates: how mood, weather, land, memory, dream, and decay fold into one another; landscape as psyche, alive, reflective, and responsive. Sometimes the land is the first witness to what the body cannot hold; sometimes the only one; and often, it is the strongest container we’ve ever felt.
We explore what we call “landscape archetypes”: resonances between personality and ecosystem, not as prescriptive models, but as poetic tools for reflection and rewilding the cultural narrative. This approach begins with humility, honoring the agency, voice, and intelligence of the more-than-human world. We attend to how certain places carry teachings about thresholds, endings, or renewal, and how our bodies and consciousness respond. We examine the dynamics behind the landscapes we seek and those we resist, curious about what they reveal of the parts of ourselves that are exiled or welcomed—and about the co-creative, reciprocal process of learning and becoming that emerges through that encounter.
I don’t separate my work as a death doula from my artistic practice. Both are ways of tending thresholds; acts of spaceholding, deep listening, and standing beside what is passing through.
Art, like midwifery, to me is a form of care — care as creative witnessing of what the world becomes in its moments of unraveling: in grief, death, decay, and the invisible currents that move between the human and more-than-human. From this place, I want to further explore these intersections in the TEMENOS laboratory — an ongoing shared field unfolding, where these threads co-shape one another, holding space for the other fellows to listen deeply, bear witness, dissolve and emerge, and be eroded in return.
Sara Cowdell is a New Zealand performance artist, curator and producer. Cowdell’s art practice strives for a raw viscerality and lingers on the uncomfortable textures of lived experience. She screams the words you keep trying to swallow because they feel so unbearably uncomfortable in your mouth. Cowdell has worked extensively with site-specific practices and has created and presented work in numerous political, natural, and unusual sites, alongside traditional arts and theatre spaces across the world.
Screaming / Laughing / Crying
Exploring emotional intensity as raw creative material and a radical feminist practice. It embraces grief, rage, joy, apathy, tenderness and every emotion or feeling as tools for connection and transformation. Vulnerability is not spectacle or catharsis, but a porous and relational state through which performance becomes a container for the unspeakable.
Dreaming of a Beautiful Future
Utopian Inquiry, Collective Structures & Speculative Futures. In a world flooded by dystopian narratives, how do we imagine futures rooted in care, play, and creative interdependence—without being naïve or escapist? Can art-making as a vehicle for social dreaming and collective visioning? Rather than assuming art is inherently utopian, examining what it means to center utopian thematics in content, method, and daily practice.
SARA COWDELL
My (Your) Body in the Field
An exploration into site-specific practice—into the permeation between self and environment, body and landscape, sensation and meaning. It is about building possibilities: for live performance, video work, photography, happenings, and working method-ologies developed through consistent, embodied inquiry. The process doesn’t begin with fixed ideas, but with presence—allowing questions to arise through doing, following intuition, and attuning to what surrounds.
There is profound magic in the tension between what the world offers and what the individual wants to say.
What does the body evoke in space? How can the mundane become absurd, the beautiful grotesque, and back again?
Curiosity is not just a tool, but a mode of operating.
Relationality is everything—working closely with place and others, allowing the environment to shape the process as much as the body does.
Cruelty/Care
Continuing my exploration into the basic question of why are men so god damn violent? And what does that mean as a woman? Interested in the ongoing exploration into gendered power dynamics and violence, through feminist, political, and embodied lenses. Considering how and why these incidents are so inherently gendered and what it means when bodies become sites of control, projection, and harm—and how does the body in art speak to these issues. Refusing tidy resolutions, I’m interested to dwell in discomfort, contradiction, and the murky ethics of representing trauma in art.
More details about Sara's Labs (including proposed practices and research questions) can be found here.
TAMARA MONTENEGRO
Tamara Montenegro is a sound artist, writer, and facilitator who creates bridges between individual healing and collective transformation. Through her NAOBA music project and Heart in Nature sound library, she weaves together biosphere recordings, neuroacoustic experiments, and community healing practices. Rooted in deep inquiry and radical relating, her work spans sound installations, emotional literacy facilitation, and mythopoetic nature immersion. Currently based in Nicaragua after years of global nomadism, Tamara considers herself "a doula for the death of an old world in each of us and the birthing of the version we decide to create."
Regenerative Relating & Consciousness Labs
My laboratories emerge from a simple truth: living is creating, and creation is a tool for liberation. Through an evolutionary methodology anchored in Love, Creation, Initiation and Transformation, I facilitate spaces where authenticity becomes inquiry rather than performance—grounded, tender, and sometimes wild explorations of what it means to be fully human together.
Core Laboratory Elements:
Deep Inner Inquiry guided by silence, nature immersion, and crafted sonic journeys designed for specific neurobiological shifts. I work with sound as medicine, using my extensive biosphere recordings (collected since 2015) to attune nervous systems and reconnect people to land and lineage.
Radical Relating & Intimacy Labs featuring large group dynamics, partner practices, and smaller circle work that moves beyond societal structures toward authentic connection. These include "intimacy cafes" with carefully crafted prompts that source deeper relating, and sharing circles where group intelligence emerges organically.
Embodiment Practices rooted in Butoh dance principles, exploring how the four core emotions move the body from the inside out. Movement-based spaces invite expressive freedom while developing subtle sensing capacities.
Mythopoetic Nature Immersion including guided walks that weave symbolic language with direct earth connection, followed by integration through writing, drawing, and collective sharing.
Dream Work & Morning Practices facilitating collective dream weaving and group intelligence channeling in liminal states of consciousness.
My approach bridges individual trauma healing with dismantling larger architectures of oppression—from the inside out, individual to collective. Having worked extensively with intergenerational trauma, conscious feelings work, and shamanic psychoanthropology, I create "living laboratories" where participants become both experimenter and experiment.
These spaces are designed as relational experimentation grounds where we slow down enough to recognize subtle intelligences moving through us, tending to the invisible threads connecting mind to body, perception to emotion, spoken word to unspoken current. The goal is cultivating agency through widened perception, from which arises choice—and that, to me, is liberation.
Current Focus: Developing methodologies that use sound for neurobiological state shifts, emotional literacy facilitation with diverse communities, and creating coherence between personal healing work and contributions to global regenerative culture.
Im Zo.
May
I be a poetical being.
May
I create poetry through whatever I have the chance
to hold or present in my hand.
May for me
art is remembering
or returning
to the essence,
to the beauty,
the delicate rhythm and tender harmony.
ZO FAZLI
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Amidst the fluidity of movement and the depths of emotion, I emerge as a multidisciplinary artist, a storyteller weaving dance, acting, and poetry into profound narratives that transcend the boundaries of performance. Each gesture, each breath, each nuanced expression invites audiences on a transformative journey through the essence of human experience.
My movement practice is deeply intuitive, rooted in improvisation and inspired by the organic rhythms of nature. Trained in contemporary dance and influenced by diverse cultural traditions, I embrace movement as a language, one that communicates beyond words, revealing truths that bind us together.
Currently studying the Anthropology of Dance at the University of Szeged, I explore the cultural, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of movement, seeking to understand the intersection of body, identity, and history. As an actress and performer, I am drawn to inhabiting characters with raw vulnerability and authenticity. With a keen intuition and an unwavering commitment to truth, I delve into the psyche of each role, uncovering the complexity and nuance that breathe life into the stories they inhabit. My artistic exploration blurs the lines between dance and theater, creating immersive experiences that challenge, inspire, and provoke thought.
I continue to evolve my craft, embracing artistic exploration beyond conventional labels and frameworks. My works are my most peculiar and cherished experiences, each project unveiling a new facet of performance, each creation an opportunity to rediscover myself. Through my artistry, I seek to illuminate the unseen forces that shape human experience, inviting audiences to connect, reflect, and find solace in the shared stories that define us all. Fearlessly embracing new challenges, I surrender to the unknown with boundless enthusiasm, leaving an indelible imprint on the world of dance and theater - one movement, one story at a time.
David Fishel is a filmmaker and video artist based in New York. Over the years, he has dabbled as an absurdest poet, animated storyteller, experimental sound artist, and obnoxious performance artist. His film and installation work have been exhibited internationally. At TEMENOS, Fishel’s project marks a radical departure from the last two decades of his professional career.
DAVID FISHEL
The Selfie Series currently consists of three proposed works:
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Self-Less: A substantial tome of archives detailing a year-long performance that no one witnesses
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Self-Ish: A year-long performance without indexical documentation but a myriad of bystander witnesses
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Self-Control: A “shaggy-dog story” of a documentary generated by a crew attempting to track down the performer of a year-long performance, ultimately becoming a road-to-nowhere narrative.
My lab is ephemeral, embodied, and recursive. It’s less about producing objects and experiences than generating conditions. The aim is not provocation, but disruption: of perception, of identity, and of the asymmetrical dynamics between performer and witness. It lives between exposure and disappearance, authorship and anonymity. By staging performance as real life and treating identity itself as material, this work investigates how we become legible to ourselves and others, and what becomes possible when we don’t.
I’m currently developing a long-form performance series based on a simple premise: develop a character, become that character, and live as them without breaking for one full year, in a place where presumably no one knows I’m performing. Drawing from developmental psychology, improvisation, and philosophical inquiry, this performance takes the norms, rituals, and roles of social systems as its artistic material.
The Selfie Series (working title) involves the development of multiple components, scaffolded upon this structure. The performance itself is ephemeral, and I resist traditional notions of documentation as it pertains to the series. There’s no formal audience, no overt reveal – just sustained inhabitation. I’m interested in what unfolds under prolonged conditions of ambiguity. What happens when the performance becomes indistinguishable from life? When intimacy, accident, grief, or attachment occur mid-performance? How much of the character carries forward and how much of the self dissolves?
Some of my past work has centered on improvised performances embedded in unwitting audiences. I’m drawn to situations that unsettle the assumed relationship between performer and observer. Does an audience need to know it’s watching to be one? I think of Duchamp playing chess as his art, not in metaphor, but in gesture. Plato’s allegory of the cave also resonates here: residents watching shadows, unaware of the source. That kind of perceptual displacement, when meaning is delayed or misrecognized, has always fascinated me. I love a good A-to-D relationship that makes one’s brain do a bit more work.
This misalignment between what “is” and what is “perceived” also shapes my inquiry into selfhood. I’ve been revisiting the recorded conversations between Dr. David Bohm and J. Krishnamurti, where the “self” is not treated as a fixed interior truth, but as a recursive pattern, reinforced through memory, feedback, and repetition. I’m curious what happens when those loops are disrupted and if new patterns emerge when we stop narrating ourselves.
JESSICA DOUCHA
She was born in the Southern hemisphere, in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1986. As of now she is living, loving and breathing in Bretagne, France. She is a qualified Alexander technique practitioner and a Visual Art graduate from the University of Johannesburg. In 2016 she received a semester exchange bursary with the Museum school of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts and a public art laboratory at the Harvard graduate school of design. Before relocating to France, she worked at the Nirox foundation as an artist in Residence, curator and workshop facilitator since 2018.
Laboratory methodology :
Experiential & ritual based my core methodologies lead to understanding through doing, being, making and participating. I aim to connect the common threads in humans being, not around fear, prejudice and separation, but rather through empathy, art making & connecting with one's own body and that which is mirrored. With practicing self observation, awareness and principles of discernment, imbued with the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure, we interrogate an act of perceiving or discerning something without judgment.
I am constantly pulled towards the tension between the known & unknown, the seen & unseen, the tangible & invisible realms.
She is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice has many languages. She considers herself a maker, a learner, a narrative creator, a healer, a teacher, a philosophical thinker, a decontextualizer of objects, one who draws, listens, performs, sculpts, paints, writes. Her focus is geared towards collaborative, experiential performance & installation practices. Linked to inhabiting one's full spectrum of corporeal embodiment, she positions herself in conversation with site-specific responsive actions, movements, rituals or gestures. In alignment with the true nature of perceived solid matter, these moments are impermanent, fleeting, sometimes documented, sometimes archived, sometimes recorded, sometimes inscribed, other times seemingly lost, even forgotten. On the level of the formless, these subtle vibrational agencies of communication reveal a depth of being somewhat beyond her own intellectual comprehension. What often transpires through these multifaceted process oriented practices, is the field of energy and intent behind her work, which overrides the ego as the formless moves through her to express itself as form.
Mutual mastication.
A silent practice.
An apple eating practice.
A witnessing practice.
How to see others in yourself.
How to see yourself in others.
Each workshop will start with an intention, either personal or collective.
Together we will individually eat an apple. The core, the stalk and the seeds.
The silent ritual will end when everyone has consumed their entire apple.
Through a personal haptic process of journaling/writing/drawing/sketching empirical, emotive and intuitive reflections, these recurring laboratories will grow into a research archive to create a vantage point of the research project I will be focusing on during the fellowship. Via internal and external dialogues, together and individually, we will explore this simple ritual, to connect and unravel unknown constellations.
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