TWO Disseminating Event – Workshop with Rafi Martin

Trained as an anthropologist and puppeteer, Rafi Martin works with the concrete properties of matter and how they offer us spaces for physical and choreographic dialogue. RESONANCIAS, the latest project from his company Tectonique, is a participatory performance about attraction and magnetism based on the resonance thinking of Chilean geologist Millarca Valenzuela and German philosopher Hartmut Rosa. Following on from this project, this laboratory is an invitation to interact with Campo del cielo iron meteorites, which fell in Argentina five thousand years ago, using puppet animation techniques to interact with mineral bodies. Manipulating and letting ourselves be manipulated represents a whole spectrum of possibilities between guiding and following matter: it invites us to create bridges that bring us closer to bodies other than human. By inviting them into lessons and classes, we are revisiting the forms of interaction that are possible: by physically engaging with matter, we are opening up a space for mobilising learning that shifts bodies and ways of learning. Involving objects in lessons and teaching broadens our mental, physical and symbolic horizons: we seek to collaborate with stones and learn from them, so they become collaborators in learning. It also invites us to be more inclusive, and to experiment and co-create in order to generate knowledge.

Rafi Martin is a contemporary puppeteer and anthropologist by training, with degrees from the HMDK University for Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart and the EHESS Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is developing an artistic practice that combines the animation of matter with a methodology of field investigation, and explores questions of the human sciences by experimentally searching for aesthetic forms. Through questions of gravity, suspension and attraction, it is the animation of matter that drives him, always seeking to reappropriate bodies and imaginations. He teaches and gives workshops at Strasbourg University and the HMDK Stuttgart School of Art. Franco-German institutions such as the Fonds TRANSFABRIK, the Goethe Institut and the Institut Français support the mobility and exchange of his projects. Since 2022, he has been artistic director of Strasbourg-based Compagnie Tectonique. www.rafimartin.com