Art Life Practices
Much has been thought and written about how one’s life, experiences and autobiography can inform one’s art practice and creative processes. However, very rarely we turn this equation the other way around, and investigate how art practice, or an artistic way of seeing and positioning ourselves in the world might inform our life processes, challenges, and the creation of our day to day.
This is a journey of enchantment. Together, we will be exploring new, strange and fun ways of looking at what is around us and our autobiographies, monsters and challenges as strategies of Autopoiesis. Guided by the artistic process of visual artists, performers, poets and filmmakers that have been exploring the boundaries between art and life, as well as by therapeutic techniques such as mindfulness, visualizations, contact-improvisation and the work of Willem Reich, we will be looking at our creative processes, traumas and stereotypes and opening up space for new forms of seeing and creating. Deautomatization, presence, a living body, attention, integration of feelings, finding stimuli beyond screens are some of the key words for this process.
This course is designed for people who want to experience something new in their practice – be it an artistic, therapeutic or any practice – or that find that they are repeating the same way of doing what they do, or need a stimulus to start putting their voices in the world, or feel like they are bored with their day to day and want to shift things around. We will be diving deeply into our own ways of expressing ourselves, what motivates each person to create something and that which lies before actually creating – which I refer to as an “enchantment state” or “art state”. Every encounter will be led by the work of an artist as inspiration. Each encounter will be a collective and immersive group experimentation and after each class we will have more things to experiment on at home.
Encounter 01 Mon Feb 27th – A living body/ a living eye, opening up space – experimentations on presence Encounter 02 Wed March 1st – Autobiography and ritual – how did we get where we are? How do we want to move? Encounter 03 Mon March 6th – The materialization of anguish and trauma – Inviting our monsters to dance Encounter 04 Mon March 8th – The state of art/ the state of encounter – Finding form and frame for enchantment processes
Practical Details: All session will meet over Zoom. Price Tiers: Tier 1 $300/ Tier 2 $200/ Tier 3 $100 USD / BIPOC Tier 3. See link for high res info on Tiers.
Bio: Anna Costa e Silva (she/ her) is an artist, director, teacher and therapist. She works with constructed situations between people that challenge the limits between reality and fiction, self and other, experience and memory and exist in a hybrid space between art and clinic. Her projects happen in the intersections between visual, performing arts and social practice and unfold in installations, films and ephemeral situations. Anna holds an MFA in Visual Arts by the School of Visual Arts (NY) and a post graduate diploma in Reichian therapy from The Living Movement Analysis Center (Rio de Janeiro). She teaches ArtLife Practices at Parque Lage School of Visual Arts - an interdisciplinary laboratory she created, that unites art practice, healing, self fiction, trauma and contact. Anna has also been trained in aura reading, mindfulness meditation, reiki, U Theory, theatre, among other techniques. Anna has shown her work at Mercosul Biennial (Brazil), BienalSur (Argentina), Art In Odd Places (NY), Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius), among others. She has won awards such as FOCO ArtRio Fair, Terremoto Ubisoft residency grant (Mexico-US-Canada), Franklin Furnace performance grant (NY) and others.
References and artistic inspirations: Eleonora Fabião, Linda Mary Montano, Stan Brakhage, Grada Kilomba, Sophie Calle, Pilvi Takala, Ana Pi, Bill Viola, Rainer Maria Riilke, Catarina Lins, Eduardo Coutinho, Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Mierle Ukeles. Image credit: Lygia Clark