Graduation Presentation 2021

Gundega Melberga

Dear viewer,

Have a glimpse of an attempt to develop an approach to teaching in which listening is an educational act and one’s experiencing body becomes a tool for learning. Let me take you on a journey to intimate, embodied learning spaces that emerge within you upon encounters and intra-actions with other bodies – material and non-material.

Intimate Museum

My body and the external world exist in convergence. The sensuous and emotional experiences, the lived body of mine is involved in the process of meaning-making, in comprehending who I am and who the bodies I am encountering and interacting with are. My fleshy and mental being is shaped by spaces I exist in, just like those spaces are defined and determined by who I am. The emotional, irrational, and physical is often underrated, especially in education; it is regarded as something that must be controlled to achieve cognitive performance and gain true knowledge. I attempt to embrace the embodied and fleshy aspects of knowing and learning as equal to logical and measurable in my practice. I aim to create intimate educational moments where learning happens through one’s body and personal experience.

This is an invitation to go on a journey into your own body and being. I am seizing your ears to invite you to first look inwards instead of looking at something in front of you. To visit a space that is constructed of experiences – yours and mine, and those of others. To have a quiet, slow, personal, emotional, honest, sensuous, physical, at times dream-like, visit into your being. I invite you to sink into your own fleshiness, to listen in, and from there to look at the world within and around you.

Feel free to step away from the screen whilst listening.

Visit the intimate museum here.

How does your intimate museum sound – look – feel like?
Tell me here.

Image credits: Walter Chapell, Kai Wai Wong, Paulina Awiżeń-Pruszyńska, Scout Paré-Phillips, Vilde Rolfsen, Elise Valdorcia, Agnieszka Lepka, Nihan, Elisabeth Heinrich, Uta Barth, Viviane Sassen, Elizabeth Lies, Peter Kaaden, Viviane Perényi

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