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Online Guest Lecture by Shelley Sacks: Welcome to The Place of Questions

Lecture
CEU
Wednesday, May 25, 2022, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

The evolution of my 'Connective Practice Approach’ and transdisciplinary aesthetic practice – emphasising connections between individual and collective agency, inner work and outer action, and “responsibility as an ability-to-respond” - has many intertwined roots across continents and centuries. I will share moments on my journey to becoming a social sculpture practitioner and practical philosopher whose public co-creative practices and pedagogies have evolved through different ways of listening to, inhabiting and working with questions. It references some of the paths to uncover, explore and make sense of the questions in which I landed: the racial-capitalism of Apartheid South Africa, a Jewish community polarised into socialists and reactionaries supporting a regime with strong Nazi ties, and a globalized technosphere, severing connections of every kind – to oneself, to the ‘social’, to other-than-human beings’, to our image of the human being, and, to our quest for freedom-in-interconnectedness. This introduction to strategies of enabling connective practice, ecological citizenship and imaginal thinking -individually and together, highlights insights into Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture ideas and ‘invisible materials’, approaches to mindfulness, Goethean enquiry, my own phenomenological and aesthetic education, and the decolonisation of mind-sets…  to contextualize connective practices like Earth Forum, FRAMETALKS, Landing Strip for Souls and 7000 HUMANS, a co-creative enquiry into shaping a ‘social mycelium’, a warmth-body, a field of commitment and ‘making social honey’.