Choreographing the City Masterclass with Thomas Pellerey Grogan

This workshop will explore the role new technologies have in shaping the relationships between bodies and spaces: how do perceptions, visual, physical or virtual, calibrate our sense of location, movement, and action? In a time where the physicality of our bodies are becoming less solicited due to the automation of labour and sedentary leisure activities, while borders between states are reinforced to restrain body movements, there is an urgency to question not only our relationship to the environment (green ecology), but also our relationship to an environment; what urbanist Paul Virilio refers to as an ecology of time and distances (grey ecology). 

Consumption patterns of images from distant locations coupled with highly efficient transport services tend to reduce comprehension of time and distances, disorientating the position and movement of a body within an environment. Our sense of proprioception, the placement of the body in space, is currently giving us motion sickness. This workshop will have two main objectives: firstly, to examine the proprioceptive processes that currently exist in urban and digital spaces, and secondly, to speculate about the future of grey ecologies, using tools such as world building and speculative design.

Thomas Pellerey Grogan is a French-British artist and researcher currently based in London. His practice focuses on esoteric rituals, and their meaning when projected onto contemporary settings driven by technological tools. His work materialises through sculpture, video, and performance, the foundation for him to build speculative fictions and investigate the role that emerging technologies can play in recalibrating our current ecology, physically and virtually. 

Pellerey Grogan’s work has been shown internationally at venues including: SPACE (UK), Strelka Institute (RU), The New Museum (US), FACT Liverpool (UK), La Becque (CH), Baltan Laboratories (NL), Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), La Cité du Design Saint-Etienne (FR), Le Commun (CH), Hong Kong Design Institute (HK), Onassis Cultural Center (GR).

Hosted by Groupwork

Dates: 25th June 2023 

Time: 1-5pm

Fee: £50 

£80 – Multi masterclass package for two classes 

Email your questions to lou@theatrum-mundi.org

BOOK

As part of the course, you will receive three publications part of our Choreographing the City collection: Encounters, Embodying Otherness and Navigations.