There is a period in everybody’s life where one is still unable to speak. It’s the time, your very early childhood, before you ‘re taught a language. In that period, you look at every object as what it is, not at the function or the meaning it might have. That is a way of looking at things I really like. Later when you’re encouraged to speak, you loose your ability to look at things ‘as they are’, because you start giving names to things. You start naming things and thus start categorising things.
There is a certain kind of break in your existence, from now on you look at things and try to lable it, you don’t see it as an original and unique whatever-it-is any more. The French psycho analist Lacan (who made a very complicated theory about all this) calls this phase the symbolic order as apposed to the other phase that he calls the imaginary order . Very revealing stuff, if you ask me.
Our workshop was about shape, not meaning. The thing as it is, not the concept behind it. An attemt to try and let you look at an object in the way described above.
Judging from the results that can been seen under the category “form-lab“, presenting most of the processes I witnessed, I think it worked at least for some of you.