weight, véhicules and telepathy, how “la facultad” feels at a distance

Dedicated to exiled people and those who assist them, la facultad is a site where our dormant sensory faculties are exercised, so that we can hear, study and amplify them in collaborative situations. For the public talk on April 27, Lefkowitz and Insignares depart from written reflections on la facultad (and its different iterations since 2017), drawing out some of the ideas in dialogue with the philosopher Henrike Kohpeiß. The talk approaches an ongoing project at a distance.

Catalina Insignares is a Colombian choreographer and dancer based in Brussels. She studied dance in Canada and France, and completed a Master’s degree in Choreography and Performance at the University of Giessen, Germany. She’s interested in how to use the sensorial and fictional means of the body and of touch to develop ways to communicate with the invisible. Since 2015, she collaborates with Carolina Mendonça, maintaining a very close complicity in different manners of working together. Reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caresses and massages populate these encounters. And since 2017, she has been working with Myriam Lefkowitz as a performer and also in a collaboration that seeks to infiltrate sensory practices from the social and political realities of exiled people (La facultad). From 2019 to 2022 Catalina developed her research as part of DAS THIRD in Amsterdam. Since 2019 she is a co-curator at the Gessnerallee in Zurich.

Dr. Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher from Berlin. She completed her PhD on „Bourgeois Coldness” in 2022 and works as a research assistant at the CRC Affective Societies at Free University, Berlin. Her work and teaching focuses on Critical Theory, Black Studies, Feminism and Affect Theory. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer.

An artist chore­og­ra­pher, since 2010 Myriam Lefkowitz’s research has focused on ques­tions of atten­tion and per­cep­tion, using dif­ferent immer­sive mech­a­nisms involving direct rela­tion­ships between spec­ta­tors and artists. Myriam Lefkowitz’s work was pre­sented at the 55th Venice bien­nale (“Oo”, Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavilion), the CAC Vilnius, Med15 (Medellin), the Garage (Moscow), the Creative Time Summit (Stockholm), Situations (Bristol), the Talbot Rice Gal¬lery (Edinburgh), the Kadist Foundation (Tokyo and San Francisco), the Kaaitheater (Brussels), the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, La Galerie (Noisy le sec), La Ferme du Buisson… After fol­lowing the SPEAP pro­gramme (master’s in art and polit­ical exper­i­men­ta­tion, Science Po, Paris founded by Bruno Latour) in 2011 she became a member of the pro­gramme’s teaching com­mittee for 2 con­sec­u­tive years. Deeply involved in teaching, she is reg­u­larly invited to con­duct work­shops (HEAD, ERG Brussels, Mejen in Stockholm, the Beaux-Arts in Reims, Besancon, Quimper, Angouleme, Bourges, as part of the master Ex.Erce, the dance depart­ment at Paris 8). In 2018 she was commissioned by If I Can’t Cance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam). She is currently working on a film in collaboration with the artist Simon Ripoll-Hurier, teaching at the school of Art and Design Talm (Angers), pursuing her research in the context of la facultad- a long term project conceived with the performing artist Catalina Insignares adressed to people in situation of exil and migration- and has started to develop a consultation practice aiming to question and invent collective forms of healing.