LEARNING STUDIOS Pattani
March 2025
In 2025, SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS expanded its activities to rural areas in southern Thailand. Working in collaboration with local communities, artists and researchers Jeanette Mueller and Paul Divjak explored how local knowledge, traditions and material practices can enrich multisensory scenographies to foster systemic awareness.
Together with Kharusak Sukchuay and Thanyaporn Sukchuay, they travelled for several days to Pattani, a region marked by ongoing political and cultural conflicts as well as an increasing frequency of destructive floods. Arahmaiani Feisal (one of Indonesia’s most renowned contemporary artists and regarded as a pioneer of performance art in Southeast Asia) recommended the Patani Art Space to MUELLER-DIVJAK, where she had previously been an artist in residence.
The team therefore spent time at the Patani Art Space together with Kharusak Sukchuay (who happened to be a friend of the head of the Patani Art Space, Jehabdulloh Jehsorhoh), and exchanged views with Jehabdulloh and numerous other artists related to the Patani Art Space on artistic practices, current projects, exhibitions, and reflections on social and ecological interrelationships.
In collaboration with various local artist collectives and academics from the fields of philosophy and media studies, discussions centred on the potential of systemic thinking and sensing to open up new perspectives for dealing with complex crisis situations. The Learning Studio led to a deeper understanding of how reflective, embodied approaches in art can foster socio-political insights and resilience, as well as to the learning of local creative techniques.
March 2025 – Pattani, Thailand
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.
