Another activity during 2023 was a one-day symposium on art and mental health, organised by ERiCi (Existential Resilience Collaboration Initiative) and by the National Center for Art and Mental Health in Denmark (Danskt Center for Kunst og Mental Sundhed, CKMS), which is one of ERiCi’s external partners.
The purpose of the symposium was to explore participatory art workshops as a format for creating resonance spaces for listening together and thereby building existential resilience. We will also reflected on the concept of listening and its potential for understanding the dynamics within a participatory art workshop.
The act of listening together here means something beyond the purely acoustic and auditory. It is about creating a shared space for resonance, where a special kind of attentiveness is cultivated, for what is verbalized as well as for non-verbal affective communication. The concept of resonance, as developed by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, is a receptive mode of relating where we may be touched, moved, by the voice – or wordless presence – of another. It is also the state of being where we can resonate with the world as a whole, where the world is not silent to us. See the TEDx talk where Hartmut Rosa explains his thoughts on resonance: https://www.uv.uio.no/english/research/groups/humstud/events/rosa-210422.html
The symposium was based on the progressive work at CKMS with participatory art workshops, especially the research program REWRITALIZE, see https://ckms.dk/rewritalize/
