A lawyer who is defending her client, and an instrument maker who is tuning a violin will most probably refer to their activity as work, while the musician playing the same violin or a belly dancer taking the stage will probably refer to their work as performance. Most of us would not find it hard to see the performance of the latter two as work, but we might not have considered that most of the work we all do is in some way a performance, and that we tend to call upon different versions of ourselves to perform that work. In this episode, Marres director Valentijn Byvanck talks with visual artist Philippine Hoegen, psychotherapist Carolien Stikker and theater writer Nirav Christophe about versions of ourselves performing work.

TRAINING THE SENSES

Knowledge is not only acquired visually at schools through language and text books. Learning involves all of our senses: we learn by listening, tasting, smelling, touching – and even by using our intuition. In the Training the Senses program, participants explore and discover a new vocabulary for their senses and a new way to transmit experience and acquire knowledge. Training the Senses is an ongoing series of workshops by Marres since 2016. The podcast conversations (since 2022) are moderated by Valentijn Byvanck, director of Marres.

For more information about Training the Senses and upcoming events check the Marres website. For more info on this particular workshop click here.

ABOUT PHILIPPINE HOEGEN

Philippine Hoegen is a visual artist and performer living in Brussels. She is currently a researcher at the HKU, Utrecht, and Caradt, Avans University, Breda, with the project Performing Working. She did a series of presentations at Kunsthal Ghent titled What is Work? (03/2021-04/2022); and published ANOTHER VERSION: Thinking Through Performing (Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2020).

ABOUT NIRAV CHRISTOPHE 

Nirav Christophe writes theater texts based on improvizations by actors, libretti for opera and texts for music and dance theatre. As professor in Performative Making Processes at HKU Utrecht School of the Arts, his emphasis has been on projects in which artists collaborate with non-artistic domains. With his book Ten Thousand Idiots (2018), he has developed a model from the concept of ‘polyphony’ to describe and analyze these kinds of practices.

ABOUT CAROLIEN STIKKER  

Carolien Stikker was trained as an artist specialized in photography in London (1982) and New York (1986) and worked as an artist and art teacher before she started a practice for psychotherapy in 2015 in Brussels and the Maastricht area. She is trained as an integrative humanistic therapist, with a specialization in Voice Dialogue. This method is based on the idea that we all have different aspects and “voices” that are part of how we function.