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Erstellt: 19. Mai 2025

Workshop with Marlon Miguel: "Lygia Clark and the Phantasmatic of the Body", 26 May 2025

A collaboration between Marlon Miguel, artist Violett e a. and the seminar "Lygia Clark ́s Participatory Art and the Politics of Memory: A Critical Exploration", by Mona Schieren and Monika Dorniak (Hochschule für Künste Bremen)

Date & Time: Monday, May 26, 2025 | 10:00–16:00
Location: KunstKartell Studio (Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin)
Registration is mandatory: marlon.miguel@uni-weimar.de

This workshop, conceived in dialogue with the on-going Lygia Clark's retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie, examines how her participatory practice—from Caminhando (1963) to Estruturação do Self (1976–88)—activates the body as a phantasmatic space: a permeable, destabilizing field where desire, trauma, and collective memory collide.

Through relational objects, sensory provocations, and collective rituals, Clark’s work erodes the distinction between self and other, rendering the unconscious tangible and transforming intersubjectivity into both an aesthetic and political proposition.

At the heart of our exploration is Clark’s radical dismantling of authorship and tactile norms—exemplified in Baba Antropofágica (1973), where saliva, breath, and bodily entanglement become acts of resistance against capitalist alienation. Can her notion of the "collective body" propose new forms of coexistence? We will pursue this question through somatic exercises, theoretical discussions, and close engagement with Clark’s late proposition of The Structuration of the Self . The workshop culminates in a critical dialogue with Frantz Fanon’s late writings on psychosomatic disorders, interrogating how colonial violence is somatized—and how Clark’s practice might offer strategies for its undoing.