Other Spaces: Enlightement Machine – 12 Exercises (Work-In-Progress)

Other Spaces Collective is preparing a new production titled ENLIGHTENMENT MACHINE – 12 EXERCISES, which approaches the most heightened modes of human experience.

At this stage, the process will lead up to a work-in-progress demonstration and a workshop, which will take place at Merimelojien maja (”The Clubhouse of the Kayakers”), in Helsinki (Address: Merikannontie 10).

The demonstrations will take place on Friday 5 May, from 17–19, and on Saturday 6 May, from 14–16. The public workshop, where people are invited to try out the techniques and exercises of the demonstrations, will be arranged on Sunday 7 May from 13–16.

Both events are free of charge. The events are in Finnish.

The workshop requires enrolment. One can enroll themselves either at the occasion of the demonstration or by email at info@toisissatiloissa.net

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The Other Spaces Live Art group has become renowned for its performative enactments, where it embodies more-than-human phenomena and states. This time, the transformative exercises the group has developed study the most heightened form of human experience, the enlightenment.

Traditionally, that state of spiritual perfection has been described by words like awakening, happiness, freedom, joy, freedom, serenity, compassion, equality, emptiness, and wholeness, and it has been searched for within different traditions of meditation. All meditation is based on certain body techniques, which often are strictly codified and hard to learn and practice. At the same time, everyone has every now and then insightful moment, which, like enlightenment, may have a deep impact on a person´s life. Those ”little enlightenments” may occur for instance in nature, in art, while making love, giving birth, being drunk, or in other exceptional or extreme states.

Enlightenment Machine focuses on those momentary experiences, trying to find simple technical means for producing them alone or together, and over again. Could the spiritual quest become a matter of a new kind of imagination, experimentation, play and common invention? How to make it accessible and practicable for all?

Enlightenment Machine calls for the update of the modes of spiritual ascesis without banalizing them. At the same time, it challenges us to ponder our relation to the contemporary enlightenment industry, which works in conformity with the self-centered performance economy.