The Nature Within

Many people retain a close relationship to nature while others rarely leave the urban landscape they live in. How humans relate to nature affects their lives and their identity. But what about nature that is inside us? How do we relate to the thousands of natural processes that occur in our body every second of our lives? The heartbeats, the breathing, our balance our retention of stable temperature? How do we actually feel our bodies? Why do we go for a walk in the woods when we want to experience nature, instead of focusing on sensing the inside of our bodies?

Curatorial Mutiny and Vision Forum organise half a dozen international and interdisciplinary performance workshops that investigate how nature expresses itself inside our bodies and how we can practice to become more in tune with these processes. Many will include public work-in-progress presentations where the audience becomes engaged in the performances.

We take our starting point in contemporary medical research on microorganisms. Every human being has over one kilogram of microorganisms in his/her gut that we live in symbiosis with and that are necessary for digestion and other daily processes. They can live without us, but without them we die.

They affect our mood, but probably also to what extent we are curious and social. The understanding of how our bodies work and what a human being is changing quickly. We can say that the view on man is shifted from being an individual to be seen as an ecosystem.

The Nature Within brings together groups of young professional visual artists, choreographers, musicians with researchers in philosophy and medicine for a dozen workshops. Vision Forum has collaborated with medical researchers in projects such as the EEGsynth and OuUnPo. We have a very good network of contacts around the world, both with artists, educators and researchers. We are well equipped to create a network that can help the arts, people’s lives and science at once.

- Program for first set of workshops.

- Program for second set of workshops.

- Program for third set of workshops.

Participants:

Carola Uehlken (Curator/artist) Elias Arnér (Professor in Biochemistry) Giada Lo Re (xyz.PhD) Carima Neusser (Choreographer), MaiBritt Giacobini (Child psychiatrist MD, PhD) Per Hüttner (Visual artist/musician) Oskar Gudmundsson (Writer), Adriaan Samson (Writer) Freddie Ross (Art historian) Emil Krog (Visual artist), Simone Bang Jørgensen (Visual artist) and Saber Rhaleb (Musician).

The project is developed in dialogue with Vision Forum and is supported by the City of Stockholm and the Swedish Arts Council. The process and group has now expanded and moved into a new phase and is called “Governing Bodies” and you can read more about it here.