THE ENQUIRY LABS

The Survival Room, Connective Practices, Exchanges, Seminars-Conversations are all ‘Enquiry Labs’ that bring people together – on the ground in Kassel and online – using the connective practice and social sculpture approach and insights.

Although each Enquiry Lab has a different focus, they all set in motion explorations of the following questions:

What kind of future do we want?

What is our picture of the human being and why do we need to explore this picture?

Why did Beuys emphasize that ‘it is the human soul that needs saving’?

What does it mean to shape a humane and ecologically viable future? And what capacities are needed for this?

How do our narratives… our ways of seeing and being… need to change to stop c reating so much unnecessary suffering?

What can the field of ‘contemporary social sculpture and connective practice’ contribute to the field of transformation concerned with a multitude of intersecting crises?

How can its insights and practices contribute to overcoming racism, fascism, and the abusive use of the earth, its creatures and each other?

Through reflections on the connective practices, exchanges and seminar-conversations, as well as within them – the Kassel-21 Social Sculpture Lab is an enquiry in itself.

Through this Kassel-21 Social Sculpture Lab we therefore also aim to initiate explorations:

– about the need for and value of methods and strategies that integrate aesthetic and political education and a public exploration of how this can contribute toward insightful, deliberative democratic participation and the shaping of a humane and living society

– on how ways of embodied knowing sit with epistemologies of the South and indigenous knowledge systems

– on the ways in which new developments in Social Sculpture and Connective Practice go beyond the Eurocentric context of their sources

– about how insights that occur in the practices, exchanges and seminars can be made accessible beyond the lab in Kassel, and every visitor-participant to the lab can have an experience of being a researcher, as well as a social artist!