f/old.fall.nest.
the f/old as emerging activitiesstates
Image from fold.fall.nest.by Susan Sentler - part of the online exhibition bulanujung: Against Disimagination 2021
an online workshopping
with Susan Sentler & Glenna Batson
26th & 27th of April 2025
What is a fold? – a lapse, a co/lapse? a seamless, cataclysmic fall into the outer world of the unknown? or, can the fold yield a liminal s/place of rest and hibernation, one that from the inside, giving rise to germinating poiesis? The f/old as practice engenders a translocation through space-time – potency that is both the parenthesis and aperture of being and becoming. Here is the groundswell, the seed of artmaking, sprouts that rupture habit and habitat. This workshopping is rooted in our shared 10-year practice, the f/old as somaticartistic practice. We invite you – the curious - to enter embodied landscapes where the ephemerality of folds/folding engage with the liminal potential of convergence of inner and outer worlds. Through spontaneous word play, images, and mixed media, we will awaken to the eruptions of gesture, movement, and aesthetics, all that emerges from our fluid ‘skins’ and internal currents. Working with repetition and re-entry, multiplicity, mixed-media, curation and anarchiving, we will co-create novel somatic ‘maps’ of our individual and collective aesthetics. We welcome participants of any discipline, art form, or simply persons wanting and willing to explore the unknown and co-create in a warm gathering.
The workshop plot is inspired by Susan Sentler’s reflections, works and practices - initiating in 2017 while living in Singapore.
This workshop also celebrates the release of our publication
artmaking as embodied enquiry – entering the f/old https://www.intellectbooks.com/artmaking-as-embodied-enquiry
Saturday & Sunday - April 26th and 27th
10 am – 1 pm ET (3 – 6 pm UK/Ireland) (+6 CET)
Fee for both days €50, €40 if paid before 1st of April.
PayPal shsentler@gmail.com
One day participation, Saturday or Sunday only €30
Bring a friend (€35 per person)
For other payment modes, please contact shsentler@gmail.com or thefoldcourse@gmail.com
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the f/old as somaticartistic practice
F/olding-unfolding:
inhabiting geological transformations
image collage Susan Sentler, dancer Valerie Lim, negative image and cyanotype image from Sentler’s work See, Sea 2013.
Susan Sentler was invited to create a bespoke f/olding workshopping for TBA21–Academy, the Study Group led by Yina Jiménez Suriel as part of The Current IV Caribbean: otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves], 2023–2025.
Zoom on June 11th 2024 at 12:00 h pm AST / GMT-4
What is a fold but overlapping layers? This workshop/talk invites the curious to enter and re-enter the ephemerality of folds/folding – a liminal space that allows for a shapeshifting of our habitus. Here, topographies become embodied – giving rise to a novel somatic ‘map,’ one that grows new surfaces of geological ‘skin’ and venous currents - techtonic hybridity where images and impulses give rise to spontaneous eruptions of gesture, movement and art making. Through this inter-play with the unknown, the encounter mushrooms into a rich palate of materialities, a meeting of seams, sheets, currents, lodes, lamina, plates, edges. Together, we will surface and submerge into this improvisational terrain, a groundswell for transformative knowledge to emerge.
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the f/old as somaticartistic practice
St/itch
a catalytic conversation in art making
event/workshopping online
Susan Sentler & Glenna Batson
Saturday/Sunday
20th & 21st April 2024
8am - 11am EDT both days
image
collage Susan Sentler, dancers Stella Papi and Elisa Vassena, from Sfilare II 2011What is a fold, but a joining of surfaces. This event invites the curious to enter and re-enter the ephemeral fabric of folds/folding. Like a gesture of needle-to-cloth, the f/old as somaticartistic practice is a tactile confabulation with the pliable, thingy-ness of pleated materialities. The first prick is generative – it gives rise to a stain, that gives rise to a process. Rummaging into the juxta-folded surfaces of the somatic moment, we are inducted into liminal space. Nothing is lost or absent in the encounter … micro-fibril, grain, grit, hair, string, tendril, thread. Lapsing into the unknown, we meet the filigree of making, the irreverent remains of a baste stitch - a vein, a faint imprint of muddle, mystery and memory. Come join this gathering and enfold into the soft cuff of the f/old, a corporeal toile of co-creation.
Saturday – Sunday, 20th-21st of April, 2024 Online with Susan and Glenna
8 am – 11 am EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) - 3 hours each day
Please check your local time zone.
Fee: €60 both days, €40 for one day participation
For further information and booking information: thefoldcourse@gmail.com
Participants will be sent a list of materials and zoom link within 2 days of the workshop.
Workshop inspired by a quote from English author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941, Orlando: A Biography). ‘Memory is a seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after…’
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the f/old as somaticartistic practice
the f/old as corporeal carrier bag
a catalytic conversation in art making
Hybrid workshop (participation both live and online)
Susan Sentler & Glenna Batson
Saturday/Sunday
1st & 2nd April 2023
9am - noon EDT both day
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image Susan Sentler, dancer Valerie LimBodily fold/folding is the substrata of our worldly engagement. Folds act like a porous carrier bag,* a transient repository of ‘things’ – continuously morphing between inner and outer worlds. Through en/unfolding, this pliable pouch reveals its generative capacity to transform into multiple materialities and become anew. At the same time, folds can become lodged and densified, nesting comfortably in the realm of habit, dampening their potential for creativity and renewal. We invite you to in explore the Janus face of the f/old: the generative fold that sources creativity, and the fold that lies dormant in the realm of habit. We will draw from our decade of practice-based poetics: the f/old as somaticartistic practice.
*The concept of carrier bag comes from novelist Ursula Le Guin ‘s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction 1988. Le Guin notes, ‘words hold things.’ In our work, we take this ‘holding’ to be the internal and external bags and baggage we carry and our ability to transform from habit to new corporeal creation through a somatic/artistic journey.
Hybrid Option
The live workshop will be hosted by NiFe at Vivid Oblivion a spacious 1200 sq ft studio in Inman Square Cambridge, MA. Creative director NiFe has dedicated this space to strengthening intersectional, international, and intergenerational co-creative dialogue to catalyze change, deepen networks within ourselves, place, and each other in service of visioning new and better futures. NiFe welcomes all those who can attend in person. The Zoom link will be sent a few days before the workshop. The studio opens new trajectories within body and landscape, through the wilds of interdisciplinary exchange, rigor and the untamed in performance, dance, somatics, design, and emerging spiritualities.
Instagram @nu_____v_o
Fee: €75 both days, €45 one day ($80/$50 US or other currency equivalent).
Upon registering interest, you will be given information on how to pay.
Contact Glenna Batson: thefoldcourse@gmail.com
Please pay before the starting date. Links will be sent upon payment or by March 31st.
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the f/old as somaticartistic practice
a catalytic conversation in art making
Blended workshop (live and online)
Susan Sentler & Glenna Batson
Saturday/Sunday
15th & 16th of October 2022
1 – 4 pm GMT both days
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image collage Susan Sentler, dancer Valerie Lim (image left from Sea, Sea 2013)
Artistic creation hinges on experiencing the moving body in new ways. In this workshop, Susan and Glenna invite you to explore the aesthetic dynamics hidden within a simple fold. Drawing upon their decade of collaboration, the two facilitators provide a portal through which to explore the multidimensionality of folding. They offer this entry into movement creation through an approach to somatic embodiment and multimedia play.
Consider the theme: Drift. The word drift finds its derivation in Old English, meaning, ‘a being driven’ (like snow, perhaps). As well, drift suggests a sense of ‘what one is getting at,’ (as in, ‘Do you catch my drift?’). When embodied and embedded in creative process, drift becomes a powerful agent in art making.
Far from passive and listless, drift acts as an embodied nemesis in the controlling mind. Drifting is a catalytic agent, one that allows both mind and body to let go of habitual control and the limits of finality, common obsessions that interfere with creativity - or simply, what comes next.
Drift ramifies…meeting an array of fragments and phantoms as it suspends in space-time. Drift-as-fold seeps and slips effortlessly through embodied portals where gravity gives way to free fall. Multidimensional and dimensionless, drifting folds invite the moving witness to rise, loom, dissipate and re-emerge in the liminal, shapeshifting matrix. Here, participants discover new pathways that connect embodied perception with the emergence of movement freedom.
Susan and Glenna invite everyone to contribute to creating the group field, an immersive, sensory-rich environment. Here, participants can enter and exit in the en/unfolding continuum, exploring the many manifestations of folds adrift. They will also be invited to partner in a process of making with different forms of multi-media – paper, fabric, photography, drawing, and filming. A multiplicity of images arise from the experiential mix of material ‘batter’ – material/matter to curate building a generative archive/anarchive. As the emergence of these novel images transcend the moment and become art, a rich tether to embodied creativity.
Come enjoy the disparate possibilities of entangling in the fold, whose drift has no origin or end.
This workshop is part of the growing archive of artistic research co-evolved by Susan and Glenna, known formerly as Human Origami, and now as, th/fold as SomaticArtistic Practice.
Fee:
£60 for two days (3 hours each day)
£40 either Saturday or Sunday
︎︎︎ Tickets
or PayPal shsentler@gmail.com by 12th of October
For those attending live, please come to:
London Performance Studios
Penarth Centre, Penarth St
London SE15 1TR UK
Studio 5
Note: the studio will be available from 12:00 noon on both days.
However, we will begin the workshop(s) at 13:00.
If you need to contact us prior to arrival, please phone
+44(0)7779162507.
︎︎︎ Tickets
DRIFT
a catalytic conversation in art making
Blended workshop (live and online)
Susan Sentler & Glenna Batson
Saturday/Sunday
15th & 16th of October 2022
1 – 4 pm GMT both days
image collage Susan Sentler, dancer Valerie Lim (image left from Sea, Sea 2013)
Artistic creation hinges on experiencing the moving body in new ways. In this workshop, Susan and Glenna invite you to explore the aesthetic dynamics hidden within a simple fold. Drawing upon their decade of collaboration, the two facilitators provide a portal through which to explore the multidimensionality of folding. They offer this entry into movement creation through an approach to somatic embodiment and multimedia play.
Consider the theme: Drift. The word drift finds its derivation in Old English, meaning, ‘a being driven’ (like snow, perhaps). As well, drift suggests a sense of ‘what one is getting at,’ (as in, ‘Do you catch my drift?’). When embodied and embedded in creative process, drift becomes a powerful agent in art making.
Far from passive and listless, drift acts as an embodied nemesis in the controlling mind. Drifting is a catalytic agent, one that allows both mind and body to let go of habitual control and the limits of finality, common obsessions that interfere with creativity - or simply, what comes next.
Drift ramifies…meeting an array of fragments and phantoms as it suspends in space-time. Drift-as-fold seeps and slips effortlessly through embodied portals where gravity gives way to free fall. Multidimensional and dimensionless, drifting folds invite the moving witness to rise, loom, dissipate and re-emerge in the liminal, shapeshifting matrix. Here, participants discover new pathways that connect embodied perception with the emergence of movement freedom.
Susan and Glenna invite everyone to contribute to creating the group field, an immersive, sensory-rich environment. Here, participants can enter and exit in the en/unfolding continuum, exploring the many manifestations of folds adrift. They will also be invited to partner in a process of making with different forms of multi-media – paper, fabric, photography, drawing, and filming. A multiplicity of images arise from the experiential mix of material ‘batter’ – material/matter to curate building a generative archive/anarchive. As the emergence of these novel images transcend the moment and become art, a rich tether to embodied creativity.
Come enjoy the disparate possibilities of entangling in the fold, whose drift has no origin or end.
This workshop is part of the growing archive of artistic research co-evolved by Susan and Glenna, known formerly as Human Origami, and now as, th/fold as SomaticArtistic Practice.
Fee:
£60 for two days (3 hours each day)
£40 either Saturday or Sunday
︎︎︎ Tickets
or PayPal shsentler@gmail.com by 12th of October
For those attending live, please come to:
London Performance Studios
Penarth Centre, Penarth St
London SE15 1TR UK
Studio 5
Note: the studio will be available from 12:00 noon on both days.
However, we will begin the workshop(s) at 13:00.
If you need to contact us prior to arrival, please phone
+44(0)7779162507.
︎︎︎ Tickets
,