Workshop and lecture

by

Gabriel Hensche

October 4th, 6–9 PM
Ribnjak Youth Center

What if we start practising love not only within our romantic relationships, our families or with our friends but with Ourselves, Other/s and Other Other/s? What happens if we understand love, not only as something that concerns us privately but also as something that we can practise collectively. What if we start to understand love not as something that happens to us, but also as something that we can actively practise. And what would a collective practice of love towards Ourselves, Other/s, and Other Other/s eventually look like?

How to Love Many in Many Ways is a set of games and exercises that playfully challenge the way we see and practice love and with whom we share it. Starting with the question of “How to Love Many in Many Ways” Engy Mohsen and Gabriel Hensche developed 12 exercises that can be played with Yourself, Other/s, and Other Other/s. The players can be objects, plants, animals or people that share a completely different worldview or come from a different context.
In this workshop, Gabriel Hensche will guide you through a selection of these exercises that delve into both the social and somatic realms. No prior knowledge is required, and participation in these activities is entirely optional. While the workshop will be conducted in English, we will ensure that non-English speakers can fully engage and participate.

Register by email: somahut.mmk@gmail.com
Participation is free, with donations welcome according to your means.

Presentation of artistic research through a workshop approach by Kristina Marić

Sunday, May 25, 2025, from 3:15 p.m. to 4:45 p.m., SomaHut Festival

The author will present her artistic research focused on recording traumatic experiences within the body. She will speak about the process of creating the performance lecture Howls to the Stars, presented as part of her solo exhibition Inside There Is an Animal, in which she interprets affective and aggressive behavior patterns as direct consequences and catalysts of trauma.

By referring to collective, universal places, she simultaneously intertwines deeply intimate fragments of her own experiences. The artist perceives the awareness of bodily experience as a guiding factor in the process of creating artistic work.

In the encounter with the audience, she will combine narrative, collective, and bodily approaches, emphasizing moments of transition from the cognitive to the physical. Through the meeting of story and bodily experience, she explores the fragmentation of trauma and the possibilities of its transformation.

Presentation of artistic research by Tonka Maleković

Sunday, May 25, 2025, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., SomaHut Festival

In her artistic work—often developed through interdisciplinary collaborations—visual artist Tonka Maleković explores the interaction between self-regulating and politically governed processes within a social context, with a particular focus on migration, public spaces, and play as an emancipatory practice. Her artistic focus is not on places of difference, but on places of merging, identification, and the creation of new, shared experiences and memories.

Since 2022, Maleković has collaborated with historian and researcher Sophia Freidhoff on projects such as Compositions of Flow, combining artistic and scientific methods with the aim of creating a more complex image of migration in contemporary society. In her new collaborative project Melting Plots, which originates from the video Little School, Maleković observes public space as a place of belonging and collective imagination.

Inspired by Stavros Stavrides’s theories on spaces of commons, she develops artistic strategies and interventions that activate the potential of urban spaces to generate new forms of togetherness and encounters based on solidarity.

The lecture, drawing on examples from her years-long artistic research, will focus on the motif of movement—at the intersection of personal experience and broader social context. It adopts a poetic-political approach to the theme of boundaries—whether national, administrative, regulatory, real, or perceived—and to the processes that dissolve and transform them.

Sunday, May 25, 2025, from 12:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.

WHITE FLAG / Little School (2023)

video, color, sound, loop

Connecting the theme of migration with the line of artistic research into play in public space as an emancipatory activity, various segments of the installation titled WHITE FLAG function as spatial thought maps that question the notion of boundaries—physical, administrative, national, and mental.

In the exhibited video sequence, two well-known games—beloved across generations and geographies—are juxtaposed. By contrasting their character within a visual-sound dialogue and altering the perspective enabled by the camera, a performative landscape of movement emerges.

Bodies that shift and are shifted cross the lines of division, alluding to movement as a consequence of complex social dynamics and emergent phenomena that arise from them. The language of play is used to inspire critical reflection on the legacy and legitimacy of established territories, while simultaneously opening a space for further sequences of the project, such as Melting Plots, in which play returns to its original role and becomes a tool for awakening spatial potentials and practices of togetherness.

]]> 1342 https://somahut.org/figure-and-ground-somatic-learning-in-the-context-of-emerging-abilities-2/ Mon, 05 Feb 2024 16:55:47 +0000 https://somahut.org/?p=1442 Read more »]]> with Carla Bottiglieri and Thomas Greil / minima somatica

Zagreb, April 5-7, 2024

Friday: Lecture at the Academy of Dramatic Art Zagreb, Department of Dance (17-19 h)

Saturday/ Sunday: experiential workshop ( 10-16 h)

Introductory Workshop Online February 17, 2024

Time: 16-19h

Somatic learning echoes the way children learn by exploring, experimenting, and discovering. This “organic learning” is at the center of somatic practice. It aims to open perceptual processes, turning the attention to sensorial flows and to the experience of motor responses. The development in the first year of life marks the steps to arrive to verticality, and to master gravity. Underlying infant development is a tonic function, as defined by French movement therapist and researcher Hubert Godard. This tonic function determines us as gravity sensitive creatures, and lays the ground for the emergence of gestures, expressions, and postural attitudes. It reflects the ability to respond, and to cope with change. Following the principles of Body-Mind Centering® and other somatic approaches, we will explore the development and the ground of tone as well as the emergence of gestures in movement, touch, and vocalization.

Friday, April 12, 17-19 LECTURE

The lecture aims to introduce somatic education and therapy as a means of creating environments for creation and learning, by exploring the variety of possibilities of existence and expression. We understand somatic learning as a continuous construction of our relationship and participation in the world. In this perspective it is possible to address the issues of diversity, to guide the learning of new cognitive and motor skills, using the sensitivity and intelligence of the body as a ground of mediation.

Saturday/ Sunday, April 13-14, 10-16 Experiential workshop

The workshop is aimed at people who are implicated in the sphere of education and care: movement artists, creators, dance teachers, therapists, educators, social-health workers, and somatic practitioners. It focuses on the application of somatic learning in adult education, also for people caring for others in fragile conditions, especially parents, and for those teaching movement to specific publics, and for anybody interested in a sensible approach to touch and movement. The workshop is open to everybody. No previous experience with BMC, Somatics or movement is necessary.

Location:          MO Vocarska, Vocarska cesta 71, Zagreb

Contribution:   90 eur / early bird (before 20/3) 80 eur

Registration:     Reservations are required, places are limited. You can sign up by sending an email to: somahut.mmk@gmail.com

BODY-MIND CENTERING®

is an integrated approach to the study of movement based on an experiential model of psychophysical learning. In the BMC perspective, the experiential study of anatomy involves a systematic exploration of each function of the body – visceral, circulatory, respiratory, joint, muscular, endocrine, etc. – to link biological knowledge to personal experience. From a descriptive science, anatomy becomes the starting point for a specific cognitive activity that connects the abstract and “formal” map of the body to the inner map of sensations, emotions, and images. The practice of BMC involves the study of developmental movements, based on infant development from conception to walking. It allows to set perception in motion and free the imagery of gesture from the fixity of body representations, supporting new ways of being present and listening to self and others.

www.bodymindcentering.com

SOMATIC EDUCATION

is an approach to body awareness and sensorimotor experience that engages the whole person. The invitation to “start from within” to refine listening to self and others urges a mode of attention, observation and learning that stimulates and enhances the body’s sensitive intelligence. The different somatic practices developed for accompanying processes of psychophysical awareness have in common the call for effortlessness, accessibility, and simplicity of the proposed movement experiences, so that each person can build a learning path according to his or her interests and needs. In this systemic vision, the subject is inseparable from the environment – physical, social, cultural – in which he/she is constituted and with which he/she builds, without ceasing, dynamic relationships and links of meaning. Somatic methods interact with many disciplinary fields: from the sphere of movement education in the artistic and sporting disciplines, to that of therapy and neuromotor rehabilitation, from psychophysical wellbeing to prevention in general.