March 15

The Art of Witnessing

Kerstin Schubert-Strauß and Philip Stoll

Witnessing is love. It’s a real art of self. It requires full attention and great courage. What a challenge to open our selves to the raw complexity of the world’s processes! What a task to let go again the witnessed reality and return to a healthy emotional, mental and spiritual life. And what an opportunity to cultivate and explore GSW together. This GSW workshop offers a new beginning in how we become more sensitive, active global citizens. Inwardly hosting the unfolding of world processes can create a space of transformation for our selves and that which we witness. In this workshop we will explore some key witnessing capacities and qualities like attention, self-awareness, self-regulation or listening. We will also give some tools to regulate yourself after taking in challenging world-events. In order to tap into each ones witnessing capacities we will give space for peer-sharing – to listen to each other – and use our collective intelligence to develop GSW as a group. We as hosts of this workshop are two visual artists working with processes of transformation. We will share with you our learning from the artistic work and how this can be useful for GSW. We are also excited to use some artistic exercises to support the process.

Land in’ Presence

Darius Matthies & Angela von Rotz

-land on the land on which I stand expand the present moment attend to the precious movement unfolding from within-

Through guided attentive walking, movement and voice we will explore the power of slowing down, deeply landing in ourselves and with the earth. From there we explore ways and tools to become a vessel to let more of the world land in us. As a third step we will flow into a creative dialog with a specific topic we are witnessing, using our body and voice as a medium of expression.

March 16

Witnessing as an Act of Love

Daniel Remigius Auf der Mauer

Position, Placemaking, Play

Stephanie Miracle

Awakening the senses towards embodied action through playful experiences that invigorate our sense of sight, touch, small, hearing, taste and proprioception. We will use choreographic tasks and scores to physically engage with the tangible environment around your personal space. We will return to the virtual space more activated and curious about our connections despite geographic impossibilities.

The Responsive Body: GSW in Motion

Ingrid Pickel

With our body-mind-system we are connected to centuries of biological and human evolution as well the light of the future. Our capacity to feel, resonate and play with other human beings, natural entities and objects is deeply involved with human development and intelligence. The body often senses our inner and outer world before we can express these experiences with words. This workshop proposes meditational and playful improvisations that enable us to enlarge our inner space and capacity to resonate with and discern different energy constellations. We will do this by connection with natural phenomena, sensing their outer form, energy, and frequencies as first inner then outer movements and gestures. By mutually witnessing our gestures and ongoing movements, we expand our awareness into our social body. A witnessing field is emerging, we sense what is present in us as a group and what cannot be spoken with words yet.

‘Me’ and the World: Subject-object relationship through the eyes of a filmmaker

Ayşe Kalmaz

In this workshop we will explore together the composition of the moment and locate the role of our own perception in the creation / co-creation of reality. A filmmaker is often called upon to decipher the subtle composition of moments, to break them down into individual parts and, if necessary, to reassemble them. Especially in documentary work, all sensory perceptions from visual to auditory and other deeper, more intuitive ones are asked to synchronize with the moment of the event. It is not only about following the moment in the “outside” or an object, but rather about exploring how the subject, through his perception and synchronization, co-creates the movement and the nature of the object and vice versa. With simple technical means, and special exercises that sharpen and precise our perception, we will put the exploration of subject-object relationship, co-creation processes in the context of “global social witnessing”.