The Embodied Knowledge Bureau is a space for investigating, reclaiming, and engaging the body within artistic education. The course will integrate movement and somatic workshops, open discussions, lectures, and film screenings that seek to mend current disciplinary blindspots and language barriers that often exist between academics and experiential experts. Participants will dwell within an interdisciplinary community of practitioners and scholars, both in Amsterdam and internationally, who work through embodied approaches to knowledge and learning. 

Our program emerges out of a longing to mesh fields typically deemed separate — to grant access to knowledge which is too often confined to specific institutional frameworks. We believe that the body’s flesh, bone, and cellular structures archive crucial knowledge and embed both personal and collective histories which can absolutely be drawn on within artistic practice and research. 

When dominant educational theories, pedagogical practices, and institutional structures omit the body, can somatic literacy serve as a tipping point for transformation? In a cultural, economic, and technological climate that increasingly addresses subjects as disembodied brains, what unique forms of expression, sense-making, and knowledge-sharing can embodied awareness uncover?

The Embodied Knowledge Bureau targets visual and spatial makers interested in exploring the impact of embodied experience on our ways of thinking, creating, and understanding our surroundings. We welcome participants at different stages of practice, movement experience, physical abilities, and a wide variety of interests. We are excited about weaving an inter-departmental community around topics which may often seem intimidating, inaccessible, or simply unaffordable. 

The Embodied Knowledge Bureau firmly encourages participants to experiment with their own embodied expressions, languages, and styles. The program is designed to balance theory and experience, in order to allow participants ample space for reflection on the impact of their experiences on individual practices and interests. Throughout the year we will introduce an array of practices and techniques, as well as visual and written tools for describing and reflecting on these experiences. Together we will “read through the body,” using a sketchbook or body journal to document our insights and personal research. Selections of these materials will be published in the Embodied Learning Lexicon, an A-Z lexicon that will embody the terminologies and experiences that arise during the program.