If you would like to participate, please reach out to mail@shedhalle.ch with „The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices“ in the subject line and you will receive further information on the registration.

The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices is an ambulatory research center employing sensorial methodologies. It was initially a fictional institute conceived by artist Isabel Lewis in 2016 and used as a way to frame her own collaborative artistic research practice. Lewis has since been operating The Institute along with various long-term collaborators under various names, in various places and exploring different formats in art institutions, public spaces, open studios, and educational institutions.

From 24 to 26 of May 2024, The Institute will take form in Zurich at Shedhalle for the second time. It is co-hosted by Shedhalle, local practitioners and (inter-)national students. The format is also inviting a wider interested public. At the center of The Institute lies the engagement with one another’s practices and research topics and methods.

The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices invites you into an ambience dedicated to learning and experimenting with various embodied creative practices. Its aim is to hold space for research on forms of intense aesthetic engagement that address a unified human sensorium. It focuses on practices that operate beyond visually-oriented aesthetics and interweave for example taste, touch, smell, sound, and movement as well as ecological research and a sense of ritual in a contemporary context. Together, these practices’ potentials for reflection and the cultivation of analytic techniques that include sensuality are explored.

The Institute deploys an embodied aesthetic that rejects the dualistic Kantian aesthetic theory in which feeling as the bodily occurrence is contrasted with thought as an intellectual cognitive process. Embodied aesthetics here are approached as being capable of giving rise to knowledge, as meaning-making, reality-producing, and political. The Institute seeks to address the perspective of thinking/feeling persons situated in the world, imbricated with all that is the world, and not outside of it from a distant and disembodied objective gaze.

At The Institute, everybody is a learning body and everybody can bring their embodied knowledge and curiosity to the space. The Institute is open to contributions by all participants. Contributions can involve the sharing of an existing practice or the development of a new one (“practice/workshop”). Opening up current research is also highly encouraged (“research/lab”). If you would like to share a practice or research, you can reach out to us (mail@shedhalle.ch) in advance for planning or announce it on the spot in one of the dedicated “joining and proposing” slots. It is not mandatory to host a session in The Institute. You can also solely focus on joining other’s proposals.