(Your) Room for pedagogical development with Nóri Varga

7.1.2022 0 Like 0 kommenttia

Exercises for self-installation, (play)fully me

How do we perceive our playful self? What do we find interesting about peeking into our peer’s video? How can we hack this representation? Join us to experiment your playful self with objects and installation art!

Nóri will facilitate the fourth session of the (Your) Room for pedagogical development series on Saturday, the 15th January, at 9:00-10:30 (Finnish time, UTC/GMT +2:00 hours). Participation in the sessions is free of charge.

Sign up to the online session by sending an e-mail to: nora.varga@uniarts.fi. You will receive a link to the session to your email.

About the workshop:

Consciously or not, in a reflective way or not, we most probably have a great routine in documenting ourselves. We know that we hate, that we love about ourselves on the pictures, we observe when our hairstyle was good, whether our dress suited us or not, how tense we were. I am coming from an environment where the physical appearance is always terribly important in all circumstances, and others feel free to comment on it all the time, and that greatly effects on how I look at myself. On the other hand, physical appearance and its representation is something that is really easy to hack.

In my MA research I tried to reveal and enumerate the characteristics of possible artistic (pedagogical) practices aimed at disrupting capitalist (pharmacopornographic) body narratives, and to explore what could work as counterresponses to stereotypes. And also whether it is possible at all. Obviously, we have several representations of us constantly completing and rewriting each other. This time, we’ll be experimenting with our own playful ourselves and taking advantage of the world of video chats to create a fake documentary scene about ourselves. Is it interesting at all? Does this act have a performative importance? Let’s see!

About Nóri Varga:

I am a Helsinki and Budapest based theatre pedagogue, performance artist, theatre historian. I pursued a Masters Degree in Theatre Pedagogy at the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2021. During my pedagogy studies I became interested in body consciousness and body images, I developed a workshop series about the topic as part of my master thesis project. Different textures, materials and the memories we connect to them has a particular importance in my work. Recently I started to experiment with audiovisual arts. In Helsinki I presented my participatory performance series titled Forever in Our Hearts, Fe(a)tus and Stretch Marks. One of my most recent work is an online exhibition with Minttu-Maaria Makkonen and Maimu Jõgeda: My Eye Candy published in 2020. Currently, I am wokring on a shadow puppet performance with the musician Maimu Jõgeda: Tales of the things that could have been said is a feminist approach to Finnougric fairy tales.