Main Objective

Metaphorically, ‘Dialectics of the Skin’ can be understood as a work to be carried out on the co-functional relationship between the body, sound, colour, shape, line and word. It's a workshop, a call to action that brings out the sensoriality, vulnerability and intimacy of human experiences, where the skin, body and mind become instruments for reading the world, and experiences emerge from the interaction between "participants-subjects" and "environment-world". The skin, as the boundary and connection between inside and outside, represents a poetic interface that puts us in direct contact with the world and the Other.

What does the title of this workshop evoke?

Reconnection with the body: The skin is the organ that feels, touches and is touched, symbolising a call to value the tactile and emotional dimensions often neglected by rationalism and analytical abstraction.

Sensitivity to the other: As a surface of contact, the skin suggests openness to encounter, exchange and welcome, to giving and not to applause, emphasising the importance of empathy and receptivity in the way we understand the world and relate to it.

The experience of the limit: The skin is also a porous boundary, which allows flows and exchanges between what is the ‘I’ and what is the ‘other’. Thus, the metaphor brings us back to the idea of transgressing rigid boundaries, both personal and epistemological and exploring new possibilities for interaction and understanding.

The critique of the analytical world: The metaphor can be read as a challenge to the excess of abstraction and dehumanisation in ways of knowing, calling for an epistemology that considers lived experience, the sensitive and the corporeal.

‘Dialectics of the Skin’, therefore, as a general objective, can be seen as an invitation to rethink how we inhabit the world, recovering feeling as an essential element of human existence.

Abstract

‘Dialectics of the Skin’ is a hands-on workshop that explores post-phenomenological thinking as a critical response to the analytical world, bringing attention to the sensory and human dimensions often overlooked in theoretical discourse. It invites participants to engage with feeling as a means of resistance and a way to rethink artistic, epistemological, hermeneutic, and aesthetic practices, placing the skin at the centre as both a metaphor and a bridge between body and world.

Marking a century since Deleuze’s birth and drawing on Perniola’s insights, this workshop encourages a fluid movement between feeling and thinking, blending information with practice. It follows a flexible, group-based approach structured around three key themes: listening, seeing, and reading. Participants will be invited to explore, reflect, and create through sensory engagement – the heart of the workshop – while questioning the traditional divide between sensation and analysis. The aim is to open up a space for interaction that embraces multiple interpretations, new connections, and fresh ways of experiencing and understanding the world.

Through discussion and shared experience, this workshop offers an alternative to the dualistic and instrumental thinking that often shapes academic discourse. We will all be called to sensory agitations and clouds of thought. This result seeks to reinforce symptomatology: the one that comes from a position that declares that artistic practice and sensory experience are not complements but are, in other words, first languages and fundamental modes of activation and knowledge, integrated and parallel to theoretical production and towards research in the arts and education.

Workshop structure vs. methodological nomadism A - Introduction and preparation-sensory activation (30 minutes) Reception and initial orientation 1. Brief presentation of the agents provocateurs and the post-phenomenological approach. 2. The concept of "co-functionality" between body and world is explained, highlighting the skin as an essential interface for perception. Sensory Activation 1. Exposure of ambient sounds and sound textures that evoke presence and proximity. 2. Projection of warm and cold colours in (dis)synchrony with sounds, creating contrasting stimuli. 3. Performative reading of short poems and creation of haikus that suggest the connection between body and world. Objective: To awaken the participant’s multiple sensitivities to the role of the body situated in the world. B - Immersively undisciplined experience - Body, Sound, Colour and Word (1 hour) The rhizomatic division into experiment stations Participants will be divided into three groups, which will circulate through stations agitated by the provocateurs: 1. Sound Station (Music). Exploration of sound frequencies that interact with the body. 2. Colour Station (Painting, Drawing, Images). Visual experience with lights and colours projected onto surfaces and bodies. 3. Word Station (Poetry). Collaborative production of instant poetry, where participants describe bodily sensations from the stimuli received in unusual haikus. C - Co-functional Connection (15 minutes) Moment of Integration 1. Groups meet again to share their experiences in an interactive conversation circle. 2. Agents provocateurs guide a collective reflection on how the skin, the body and the senses situate us in the world. Creation of a collaborative final object (30 minutes) 1. To bring together sounds, words and images created during the workshop in a joint performance (i.e., Cagean sound image), symbolising the rhizomatic co-functionality of the group and embodying the vitality of the event/happening. Materials Needed 1. Light and colour projectors. 2. Sound objects, instruments and sound systems. 3. Paper, ink, pencils and other materials. 4. Large, comfortable space(s) that allow movement and experimentation. Target group Open to all those interested in exploring their sensory relationship with the world. There are no prerequisites.

Expected Results Expansion of the participants' sensitivity to the co-functionality between body and environment. Creation of a new understanding of perception as a situated and interactive phenomenon. Production of a collaborative, co-functional work that reflects the workshop's findings. Reformulation of the expected results with the inclusion of the expectation of generating a set of keywords that can guide future works focused on the field of artistic education, addressing the binomials theory-practice and body-mind and making them cat-shoe as a political and critical position in the face of the weight of pragmatism and predominant analytical thinking. Expected results, but now expanded A - Enhancement of Co-functional Sensitivity Participants should leave the workshop with a visceral experience demonstrating how perception/affection is a situated and interactive phenomenon, nurturing relationships between body and world. B - Production of a Collaborative Work Sounds, words and images created during the workshop will compose a final object symbolising fusions between theory and practice, body and mind, as inseparable parts of a creative process. C - Generation of mapping keywords From the collective reflections and lived experiences, it is expected to formulate keywords that guide later works in arts education. These words will be anchors for reimagining curricula and practices that overcome pragmatism and the predominance of analytical thinking in academia. E.g. of keywords: Corporeality and Immersion Hybridism Co-functionality and Integrated Perception Sensory Poetry Built-in Theory Critique of the boundaries of the disciplinary and the ordering Epistemologies of the Body and Stupid Hermeneutics Misaligned aesthetics and diverse ontologies Dialectics of the Senses

‘Dialectics of the Skin’ can benefit from an interdisciplinary set of authors who dialogue with the issues of the body, materiality, phenomenology and technologies. Here are reference authors who offer different perspectives, enriching this same workshop approach: 1. Phenomenology and the Body Leder, Drew. (1990). "The Absent Body". Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945). "Phenomenology of Perception". Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964). "The Visible and the Invisible". Nancy, Jean-Luc. (1992)."Corpus". Nancy, Jean-Luc. (2003)."Noli Me Tangere". Perniola, Mario. (2012). "Of feeling". 2. Post-Phenomenology and Mediation Ihde, Don. (1978). "Technics and Praxis". Ihde, Don. (2009). "Postphenomenology and Technoscience". Verbeek, Peter-Paul. (2005). "What Things Do". Verbeek, Peter-Paul. (2011). "Moralizing Technology”. 3. Philosophy of Touch and Sensitivity Cage, John. (1981). "For the Birds". Irigaray, Luce. (1982). "Ethics of Sexual Difference". Irigaray, Luce. (2000). "To Be Two". Levinas, Emmanuel. (1961)."Totality and Infinity". Levinas, Emmanuel. (1992)."God, Death and Time". 4. Aesthetics and Body Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1980). "A Thousand Plateaus". Shusterman, Richard. (1992)."Pragmatist Aesthetics" . Shusterman, Richard. (2008)."Body Consciousness”. 5. Anthropology and Sociology of the Body Le Breton, David. (2005). "Anthropology of the Body and Modernity". 6. Technological and Materials Studies Latour, Bruno. (1991). "We Have Never Been Modern". Latour, Bruno. (2007). "Reassembling the Social" Stelarc’s artistic projects. 7. Art and Tactile Experience U. Marks, Laura. (1999). "The Skin of the Film". Cixous, Hélène. (1970). “The Third Body”. 8. Neuroscience and Psychology of Touch Damásio, António. (1994). "Descartes' Error". Damásio, António. (2017). "The Strange Order of Things". Kolk, Bessel van der. (2014). "The Body Keeps the Score".