About this Event
Have you ever dreamed of exploring how to move your audience body beyond its role of spectator into the full bodily apparel we have at our disposal? And beyond the constraints of a regulated space to follow a more spontaneous bodily response?
In this series of workshops Seeing art with the whole body, we will explore how to listen and receive an artist's artwork and world with the three-dimensionality of our sensory bodies, moving away from an ocular-centred understanding of engaging with art. We will ask: how can we engage the whole range of our sensory machine when we come into contact with artwork and therefore reclaim the full ability of our bodies to feel and express themselves in response to artwork?
Claire Loussouarn is a movement artist and somatic wizard. She'll bring her magic to make you look at artwork from a fresh and new perspective. You will be invited to follow simple movement scores to attune to your senses, change your perspective through space and challenge our normal default position of focused forward vision. You will learn to trust your body and its subtle felt sense in response to artwork letting go of preconceptions about how you should conduct yourself in an art gallery. What more can we learn about art and an artist's artwork when we're engaging our full sensory bodies and its ability to shape and express through space rather than just trying to understand with our minds?
For this second iteration of this series at IMT Gallery we will have the pleasure to dialogue with , a group exhibition exploring home-as-exhibition and gallery-as-home. It features work that all, often through degrees of autobiography, speaks to some of the discordances of being at home: perhaps the anticipation of order amidst the everyday; or an expectation of comfort, often amidst insecurity or tension.
As well as exploring different ways of entering the artworks through movement and spatial awareness, we will attend to how bodies cross thresholds between private and public space, between being unseen and being on display, between dwelling and exhibition.
For a glimpse of what to expect, watch
About Claire Loussouarn
Claire Loussouarn is an ecological movement artist, filmmaker, herbalist, and anthropologist, and the author of How to be feral: movement practices to re-wild your body (Triarchy Press, 2024). Her work composts the cultural scripts that taught us we were separate from nature, asking what it takes to move like a creature again and to speak with the more-than-human world as kin.
Together with filmmaker Dominique Rivoal, she co-created We are grass, we are plants, we are Hackney Marshes, a four-screen immersive film installation with 3D sound, filmed over six years of shared attention and conversation with Hackney Marshes, a common land in the heart of London.
Her practice is rooted in a long-term commitment to place, shaped by over eight years of sustained relationship with the Marshes. Through a distinctive pedagogy of movement, perception, and participatory performance, she disrupts entrenched divisions between nature and culture, subject and object, repositioning witnessing as an ethical, relational practice. Her IMT workshop series, Seeing art with the whole body, extends this practice, transforming audiences into active participants, disrupting conventional spectatorship and exploring a new ethics of encounter, where seeing is a bodily, relational, and accountable practice.
No previous movement experience is required, just curiosity and a willingness to explore.
Space is limited—reserve your place and explore The House.
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Image: Anna Sebastian, Esalon (2024), oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, features in The House.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
IMT Gallery, 210 Cambridge Heath Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 16.96 to GBP 27.80
