Book a TOTEM workshop
Inspired by my own work with creating the mixed media sculptures that I have started calling Totems, I have designed a “Totem-Ritual” that I offer as a workshop.
Through steps of focusing, connecting to place, walking, finding, choosing, composting and composing the Totem workshop is an attempt to create home-comings that can be steps towards the healing of the disconnected - a mental regeneration.
By forging the healing powers of creativity to sense, manifest and enliven the connections to the ecosystems around us, it hopes to generate a stronger feeling of belonging, being at home, being part of a whole. The idea being that the transformative ritual of creating totems that resonate with the life-forces that sustain us will help forging bonds of reciprocity and responsibility.
In the book "Enlivenment", the German philosopher Andreas Weber presents the idea that humans and nature exist in a commons of mutual transformation.
The word enliven is poignant : to give life, action, or spirit to : animate.
Weber advocates for developing a first-person science, which emphasises an embodied, relational way of thinking. Instead of repressing the contradictions of life, he recommends we should embrace paradox, and partake in living creation in playful celebration.
Making Totems can be one of the nurturing and respectful ways to partake.
A way to connect with the world as “a communion of subjects” rather than “a collection of objects”, as Thomas Berry puts it.
A way of connecting to ground, to kin, to ancestry, to agency and to local ecologies through other layers, other powers, other beings, other patterns than usual.
A way to reawaken the awesome power to create that may be our most important resource in times of fear, distress and feeling lost.
A way to go through some of lifes challenging transformations via a creative composting, where the letting go and shedding of old skins can allow for a new growth, a visioning of what is to come.
Maybe these TOTEM workshops will evolve into something almost like rituals that can help us negotiate entanglement - even in these chaotic times of disruption on all levels.
Maybe help us become more aware of how life itself expresses itself through us... a journey of becoming more conscious and yielding to our inherent systemic nature as nodes in a web?
And thereby participating in the urgently needed transformation from the anthropocene to the symbiocene.
Practicalities
The workshop can be designed to your specific needs and resources - anything from 5 hours to 5 days.
It works best in groups from 5-15 persons.
It can take place in and around either my studio in Copenhagen, my workplace in Hjortespring - or at other locations like schools, high schools etc.
Contact me to hear more - and find out if we can make a plan that would suit you.