TRAINING: Shaping Words, Melting Words

“Doesn't anyone know that the body starts and ends elsewhere?” Borrowing poet and Protactile educator John Lee Clark’s question, this TRAINING invites you to explore this interdependent “elsewhere” by holding space to the shapes and textures of words and languages.

Shaping Words, Melting Words is a TRAINING series, which actively challenges and interrupts normative productions of knowledge while creating room for inclusive, embodied, and/or pro tactile communication and value systems. The entire series is facilitated by artist Raffia Li, who invites you to move the body beyond the spoken or written, into the realm of the signed, touched, and otherwise sensed languages.

She believes that if we’re able to notice the words growing on the forehead, in the palm of the hands, on the shoulder or chest of the interlocutors, then we would stretch and weave even more with each other and remake the space of relationships, the space of meanings & the space of “caring” communication.

Bring along a word, or an object with care, to join our circle of slow dialogue.

Guest facilitator Jascha Blume will join and facilitate parts of the workshop in Dutch Sign Language (NGT). NGT Interpreters: Mira Geirnaert (5 & 19 March) and Cornelie van Dijk (12 March).

Note: Please inform us about your access needs via trainings [​at​] kunstinstituutmelly.nl

Access Facilitation: Dutch Sign Language interpretation and wheelchair friendly.

We are aware that people are keen to join the TRAINING but who are, due to financial instability and worry, unable to purchase a ticket. Let us know by emailing trainings [​at​] kunstinstituutmelly.nl and we will provide a ticket free of charge and up to €20 in travel costs to be able to travel to Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam.