Finding Your Voice

This workshop explores voice finding in direct and metaphorical ways. Searching for a voice of your own is a continuous process of listening and staying attentive to where you come from, what is present now and who you are becoming. Genuine expression of voice influences your agency in the world, individually and as a collective of belonging.

Sometimes we might feel lost, not knowing who we are or what we stand for. We might feel that we were trying to be or do what was expected, to adopt ways of being that would bring us appreciation and sense of belonging. We imitated heroes and tried to live up to truths and values of the culture that surrounded us. However, what if those truths and values do not really feel quite true? What if we sense what is meaningful to us, what we need and wish for, but we are struggling to communicate it, to find ways to express what we know and care for, to give birth to our own stories?

This workshop invites onto a journey of slowing down, tuning-in and listening, as well as exploring, experimenting and expressing. We connect back to the roots, the origins, the body, the inner compass, rooted in embodied experience of resonance so that your efforts to express yourself and build your way in life won’t be separated from the roots of who you are.

Moving through a reflective inquiry, we turn attention to the body and the voice as the most direct and immediate ways of human expressions. Body has a sense of coherence and inner integrity — that’s where we find our inborn compass, and our unique voice. During the workshop we follow the inquiry through a variety of voice exercises, movement, writing, individual and group reflection. Offered by Philip Hellman and Sabina Enéa Téari.

Voices in Museum

Voices in Museum explores the abilities of human voice and its use in the space of art mediation. Participants are invited to discover the individual voice structure and its developmental potential in the process of learning and awareness of one's own art mediation competence. Participants use their own voice to create a living and contemporary connection between the individual, the group and art in a museum. It aims to connect art and the viewer in a new context, to experience the liveliness of an art object.

About the process

The combination of an art object and human voice serves as the basic inspiration, like an inner image, which triggers certain feelings and moods and in this function can often be a necessary and emotional guideline for the voice. The situations and details of the art object can thus become keys to one's own imagination in order to enter into an inner space of emotion, movement and expression.

The concrete details - e.g. of a painting or sculpture - will be recreated by the participants. It becomes a playful interaction through body postures, facial expressions, potential thoughts, moods, feelings, and associations - everything finally condenses through targeted exercises to a potential sound, word fragments, and possibilities of human voice explored in all its facets. The individual and the group thus feel their way deeper and deeper into the landscape of the art object and at the same time into their own inner fantasy and expressiveness.

As the participants' own voices become inspired and active by the art object, the dividing line between art and viewer is gradually dissolved. The viewer who actively relates to the object in this way feels increasingly at home in the art object and personally represented by her or his own expression - up to the connecting realization: "That's me - all details of the art object are ultimately to be found in me".

Cover image by Vanessa Rodegher