Slowness: Resisting normalisation through the arts
Filipe Lopes, João Leal, Escola Superior de Media Artes e Design (Porto Polytechnic), Portugal
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

Situatedness implies slowness. Both aspects represent antidotes against a normalisation that is often imposed on professors, individuals, and institutional organisations, materialised by means of mechanical and impulsive actions to meet the demands of efficiency and promised outcomes, as well as open new courses, get new protocols, or obtain funding.
Teaching arts reminds students about silence in its many facets. We give reassurance that art takes time for good reasons. In modern Western society, this ubiquitous Instagramatic-instantaneous-digital world in which our students are born and in turn embody, teaching arts represents an act of resistance and an encouragement for our students to reframe their experience of inner time, of their inner pace. Lopes and Leal invite you to question quick and easy feelings of gratification.

Shuffling, wondering, telling as collective practice of attention
Ambra Pittoni, University of Art and Design Linz, Austria
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

Initiated as a practice of data collection through images the card deck developed as a practice of attention and patience. Several rules invite you to enter a posture to read their assemblages and relations imagining new assemblages, opening up the possibility for a flow and /or allowing a chaotic rather proliferating way to organise thoughts.  Informed by Martha Kenney’s wild facts and the practice of dance dramaturgy the practice focuses on wander and on wonder as modalities of attention aiming to dwell amongst the world and to be part of its creation. As the cards are displayed on the table and turned, a story is there to be read/told/foretold/rinegociated and resituated by the collectivity of attendees along the way. Finally the agency is bestrewed among humans and things (in this case, the cards) as the story is generated by the dialogue and relation between these two. 

Body Knowledge=Presence
Sunedria Nicholls-Gärtner, IFS – Internationale Filmschule Köln, Germany
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

Join this short guided dance experience where no one is watching and there is nothing to accomplish, to serve reflection and practice deeper forms of conversation around research. Artistic research is seldom focused on slowing down thoughts or fostering a first-person inquiry within artistic processes. Generally, the work of artistic researchers looks for new ways to push forward to discover and recover humanity. This session will provide a practical exercise derived from Otto Scharmer’s and Arawana Hayashi’s Social Presencing Theater, to practice and discover together through movement and stillness what the body has to offer artistic research.

A Mindful Approach to Teaching Creativity
Hilary Carlisle, Norwich University of the Arts, United Kingdom
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

In teaching creativity, we invite students to understand and celebrate their own unique experience of the world and be open and compassionate towards the manifold lived experiences of others. This interactive workshop invites participants to take part in mindfulness practices alongside reflective and collaborative exercises that are intended to support positive shifts in our teaching practice. This workshop seeks to encourage us to reflect on, develop, and advance our teaching practice and creative pedagogy through the principles of mindfulness, in particular: presence; non-judgemental awareness, compassion, and connection.

Feldenkrais Session: An invitation to slow down and be present
Claire Binyon, ESMAE – School of Music and the Performing Arts, Portugal
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

Binyon proposes to bring the Feldenkrais Method to the table. This practice which she has implemented in the school of music, theatre, and dance in Porto is concerned with quality of experience and explores how to we can learn do something better without extra effort or force, but with attention and pleasure, presence, and ease. ARRIVE, LIE DOWN, PAY ATTENTION TO YOURSELF, EXPERIMENT WITH THE IDEA OF BEING KIND TO YOURSELF AND BECOME AWARE OF YOUR UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES FOR CHANGE, SPONTANEITY AND CREATIVITY. START THE DAY FROM PLAY — CONTINUE WITH PLEASURE.

What Moves You… in Évora: Teaching Place as a Formative Practice
Lois Rowe, Sarah Woodfine, City and Guilds of London Art School + University of the Arts London, United Kingdom
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

Presented by artists Sarah Woodfine and Dr Lois Rowe, this co-authored event will be aimed at shifting the focus of creativity away from “outputs” towards an ongoing sense of open, formative practice. Situatedness will become a strategy for widening access to broader creative knowledges that can be tapped into more readily through intuitive process. Beginning with a collective drawing exercise, participants will move into actively engaging with the environment through a traditional frottage process and be asked to draw on their own sense of place and be open to finding new perspectives through non-authored practice. The experience is designed to embrace collective place-making and value articulation through accessing immediate sources of creativity.
The workshop will build on a previous iteration of What Moves You which took place between students from Camberwell College of Arts and Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University in Canada through a virtual student residency. Seven fine art students from each institution were asked to explore space and place in their own locations. Responding to a series of questions, interesting conversations opened, about immigration, policy and the regeneration of Camberwell and Toronto. They considered issues of regeneration and aboriginality and how art can be used as a catalyst for social change.

Extended body awareness
Elena Ananiadou, Aggelos Gkiokas, Pablo Palacio, Muriel Romero, Athena Research Center, Greece; International Consortium including: Amsterdam University of the Arts (Netherlands), Forum Dança – Associaçao Cultural (Portugal), La Tempesta (Spain), CYENS – Centre of Excellence (Cyprus), Argo Theater (Greece), Medidata.net – Sistemas de Informação Para Autarquias (Portugal), FITEI – Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressão Ibérica (Portugal), Instituto Stocos (Spain), Laboratoire Hubert Curien – Université Jean Monnet Saint Etienne (France), Coliseu Porto Ageas (Portugal), ICK Dans Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Breakout Session 3: Thursday 11 May 12:00 – 13:00

In this context, situatedness is interpreted as the way that the body of a performer as an instrument and a performance as an experience can be used to interpret the body itself, our relation with it and the space around it, and the relation between the producers, the performers, and the spectators. In this workshop we will present a hybrid performance/presentation of PREMIERE that will conduct two parallel actions. A presentation of the main notions and ideas of PREMIERE will take place during a dance performance by Instituto Stocos that will explore the notion of an extended body by the use of interactive technology, in order to enhance our body presence and awareness, translating our body experiences into other sensorial modalities such as sound and light. PREMIERE is an EU-funded research and innovation project that aims to modernise performing arts, with a focus on theatre and dance.

com_Tempo: A hut for a garden – A place for togetherness
João Soares, Vanessa Franco, João Eduardo Rabaça, Maria da Conceição Freire, Beatriz Monteiro, University of Évora, Portugal
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

Coming from a Brazilian indigenous culture numbering 150 individuals, Ailton Krenak evokes the notion of multiple significances of humanities by looking at the world from a very particular standpoint. This touches on conceiving the hypothesis of ‘space of being’ — a space of senses, a ‘Eutopia’, or ‘a possibility of utopia in our own time and space’ (Geddes). ‘Situatedness’ therefore invites thinking into modalities of living (well) in a broad sense. It embodies the idea of connection with beings, things, and spaces around people (territory). In architecture and landscape architecture, it is called ‘context’. Biologists call it ‘habitat’. This session thinks and designs a pavilion-like structure (a hut) built with an environmental consciousness, both in the systems and processes, materials, and forms and within an awareness of natural and cultural contexts.

Nature is My Homeland
Marta Bozyk, Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, Poland
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

Learn about the project ‘Nature is My Homeland’, which involves creative activities (drawings, installations, graphics, and inter-media forms) focused on the concept of nature as the ancient homeland, based on cultural anthropology, art history, and natural sciences. During the workshops, meetings, and lectures the artists and researchers reviewed models of interaction between humans and nature and their reflection in art. The project includes hosting international workshops and seminars with the participation of specialists, artists, educators, and students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and three foreign universities; exhibitions involving participants from Poland, Serbia, the United States, Germany, and other countries; and the publication of monographs. The project produced a feature film presenting interviews with natural science experts, urban beekeepers, and artists dealing with nature.