The idea of the laboratory began with a question about the relation between an intimate experience of memories and their cultural context contained in images and narratives. Where do we start and where do we come back? This is the question that the body and the mind constantly ask each other; a question posed by people when they meet each other on the way. We escape, pursue, lose our way and reach our destination. What will be left after us are traces and paths that others will take, too. The results of the wandering are within each and every one of us and within us as a group in the form of memory.

The strategic objective of the laboratory is to help its participants to build a profound sense of responsibility for their own memories as component parts of collective memory and thus of other people’s memory. The practical aim of our workshops is, therefore, to discover or create, and as a consequence to practice the patterns of behaviour, actions and interpretative procedures allowing the transformation of diverse aspects of memory. We will address processes of remembering and forgetting and the very matter of the remembered, namely images, gestures and ideas. We will try to use metaphors in a cognitive function and to translate verbal narratives into physical actions. We will invoke the memory of the body and the performative aspects of hermeneutics.

We believe that the memory which separates may be the foundation of integration which does not impose limits. It is, then, by no means a coincidence that we make references to people who use memory on a daily basis and make it a matter of artistic creation. By allowing an encounter of artists and theoreticians of diverse artistic fields from Germany and Poland, neighbouring countries sharing a common history, we wish to create a situation of a mutually enriching confrontation.

The dominant art, the focus of the events of the laboratory, will be contemporary dance. We want to combine the sensitivity of the body with the inquisitiveness of the mind to fully regain what has become forgotten. Talking with each other and dancing we will identify and examine symptoms and signals reaching us from memory, traces and tracks, the remains, ruins and shadows which will allow each of us to regain oneself, a free, autonomous and responsible individual.

moderators:
Jadwiga Majewska (Kraków)
Rosi Ulrich (Berlin)

co-operation / consultation:
Małgorzata Sieczkowska (Poznań)

Małgorzata Sieczkowska psychotherapist, psychological trainer, author of self development and education projects; she practices Systemic Constellations, education and therapeutic group work dedidated to establish the peace and order between generations and to find an apropriate place for transgenerational feelings; she also practices Sistemic Ritual, a structured group work oriented to the wider field of the tribal soul, national identity, universal issues in order to solve the unconscious entanglement human being can be in.
www.malgorzatasieczkowska.pl