LEARNING STUDIOS Engadin
2023 – 2026/27
As part of SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS, the Learning Studios usually bring together artists and scientists from different fields to explore how we perceive and understand living systems. In an open and informal setting, they exchange ideas, experiment with sensory methods, and develop workshops as well as acoustic, olfactory, and haptic artworks. The aim is to create multisensory scenographies that make complex systems tangible and experiential.
For the Learning Studios Engadin (Switzerland), MUELLER-DIVJAK (Jeanette Mueller and Paul Divjak) take a different approach. Here, the focus shifts from collaboration to immersion: working in silence and seclusion, without other human beings, and engaging deeply with a more-than-human slant – accompanied only by a beloved local dog.
Twice a year, they spend several days or weeks (depending on their schedules) in high-alpine landscape of the Upper Engadin.
MUELLER-DIVJAK roam through the forests and mountains exploring conditions and movements in the plant and animal world, various changes, seasons, and interplays between humans and more-than-human world, often barefoot.Through drawing, listening, recording, and sensing exercises, they investigate how subtle textures, smells, and sounds reveal the dynamics of living systems. Field recordings from diverse environments – forests, rivers, glaciers, village life, flight paths, and alpine meadows – are collected, processed, and later integrated into the project’s scenographies.
Getting lost and finding orientation again becomes part of the method, opening new ways of sensing and understanding space. A recurring point of focus is the Morteratsch Glacier, a long-studied and rapidly shrinking glacier in the Bernina range. MUELLER-DIVJAK perceive the Glacier as a non-human being, that expresses its situation by sounds and shapes. Observing its transformation over time makes the interaction of living systems and climate change physically and emotionally perceptible, grounding systemic thinking in lived experience.
LEARNING STUDIOS
As part of SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS, the learning studios bring together various artists and scientists with their diverse expertise, experiences and perspectives. In confidential and relaxed atmospheres, they exchange questions and ideas and develop sensory approaches, workshop concepts, and acoustic, olfactory and haptic artworks to create multisensory scenographies for systems awareness.
In the Learning Studios, sensory and body-oriented practices encourage participants to develop and test scenographic and performative elements that make an understanding of living systems physically and emotionally tangible. The Learning Studios take place in a variety of settings – from urban spaces to remote natural landscapes, often in close collaboration with local communities and external experts.
These are collaborative, respectful and practice-oriented spaces, based on the conviction that knowledge and new insights grow through diversity and dialogue, sensual experience and the exchange of perceptions and thoughts.
