Thinking with space-time dimension of place (III), Open Spatial Laboratory 2024

Notes: The work arising within the Open Space Laboratory has a long-lasting character, with various groups of people and more-than-humans being able to enter it. It has the character of an open workshop – an event – testing (non)knowledge. The OSL framework represents an open process of embodied learning.

*All the works are produced in a small group together with our children (Váva 7. years & Elza 3. years) within the SWA curriculum.

Teaching Myself to See Deals

Each object evokes a different pattern of emotions, disagreements and agreements. Each object gathers a different congregation around it. In other words, objects bind us all in ways that map a space profoundly different from how we usually perceive space. This dynamic geography, the network of relationships, and how to communicate these connections is one of the key points of this Open Spatial Laboratory.

How is the body incorporated into these narratives? Yet the body that is in place is the practice and execution of the experiences experienced, focusing attention on the sensory, embodied vision through which the sentient person – child learns what it means to perceive, feel and understand through (our) complex relationships with the ocean.

If life evolved from our current, plastic-debris-filled oceans, what would emerge?

What would happen if life started in the ocean now?

What if new creatures emerged that could live off of plastics?

Because plastics don’t just disappear. We should learn to live with them in an empathetic and collaborative way. At the Open Spacial Laboratory, we systematically work with the impossibility of separating plastics from our (children’s) bodies. We accept the idea that we can no longer separate our human bodies from the artificial polymer bodies patented in 1909. We treat plastics as if they were a strange chthonic mass.

The strangeness of plastic is that, on the one hand, it is a strong petrochemical compound released from the ground, organic and inorganic at the same time. It exists outside the logic of decay and transformation, in its own category of creation, where microbes and bacteria have not yet evolved much to use their incredible energy sources to decompose or transform it. We like to play on such organisms in our learning. We would also like to point out the strangeness of plastic because, in this case, there is always something at play, something left open – unfinished.

We often forget the fact that it is these objects that will outlive us all (us parents and probably also our children).

In this Open Spatial Laboratory we say that our lives are inextricably linked to the materials we make, use and then dispose of and re-sort and give them new life and new life connections.

We talk about all of this among ourselves and with the materials, trying to figure out how they could newly co-exist with each other. In this process (not just children) they enter into a very interesting matter of connections and relationships that create new logical and illogical connections with each other. It’s a very useful way to develop the world in its possible and impossible contexts. We see ourselves as part of a complex ecology instead of feeling dominant towards ecology.

I. Part