On the Radical Empathy Lab – Experiential and Relational Knowledge Formation

In this 3h seminar Berit Fischer will share her practice of the Radical Empathy Lab (REL) and we will engage in some exercises to experiment and activate the theoretical input.

The Radical Empathy Lab is an on-going nomadic, experimental eco-social and research laboratory for a holistic activation of knowledge. It challenges the metrics driven notion of a laboratory, embraces relational –versus informational– learning, and what Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik calls “the knowing body”. REL works across disciplines and experiments with holistic advances, in which the cognitive intertwines with the non-semiotic and the sensual. The lab actuates exercises that find inspiration in Deep Listening, decolonial and radical pedagogies and practices of mindfulness, and that rehearse to reconnect to our sensing, knowing bodies, and practice towards stimulating a micropolitical critical consciousness for our ecological entanglements. REL explores experimental forms of being together, that allow us to reflect, to at least momentarily re-feel and to undo a reactionary an-aesthesia (Greek: an-aesthēsis: without sensation). By moving from individual to collective activity the lab experiments with the relation between micro and macro dimensions of agency, and with practices that carry the potential to decolonise and de-subjectivate the (social) body and its ecological relationality to the “Other”.