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Cornell University

Public Safety Communications Center

Division of Public Safety

What Can Bodies Do? Biopolitics and Choreographies of Daily Life Workshop Series with Social Practice Artists

Start Date: February 26, 2026
Start Time: 12:00 am
All Day Event? Yes
Location: East Sibley HallRoom 140
OverviewThis workshop series accompanies Professor Pamela Karimi’s seminar: Biopolitics of Architecture & Art (ARCH 4408/6408).The series brings together internationally recognized social practice artists whose work explores how bodies move, sense, and negotiate space. Through movement-based prompts, collaborative exercises, and place-responsive practices, participants will examine how physical action, perception, and social norms shape the rhythms of everyday life in the built environment.Each workshop addresses the entanglement of embodiment and spatial experience and offers an experiential complement to the seminar’s theoretical frameworks. Together, the sessions invite students to reconsider architecture not only as a material field, but also as a relational and choreographic terrain formed through ordinary gestures, encounters, and modes of collective being.Free and open to the public.Workshop Series With Social Practice ArtistsWorkshop 1: Tanin TorabiAward-winning Tehran-based filmmaker and choreographer known for innovative single-take screendance works.Title: Narratives of TogethernessFocus: Embodied knowledges and the re-experiencing of personal and social movements.Time: February 26, 2026, 10–11 a.m.Workshop 2: Sarah KanouseInterdisciplinary artist and Northeastern University professor exploring the political and ecological dimensions of landscape.Title: Listening With PlaceFocus: How collaborative listening practices can help us experience place as kin rather than as resource.Time: March 5, 2026, 10–11 a.m.Workshop 3: Ellen MuellerInterdisciplinary artist and Arts Midwest program director whose work examines the environmental and social impacts of capitalism.Title: Embodied Community CareFocus: How we tend to our communities and shared futures, especially when the work is mundane, repetitive, or difficult.Time: March 12, 2026, 10–11 a.m.Workshop 4: Gabo CamnitzerArtist and Mass College of Arts & Design professor investigating childhood, socialization, and experimental forms of learning.Title: Individual and Collective EntanglementsFocus: What is the smallest piece of society, and what forms of relation, labor, and imagination constitute it?Time: March 19, 2026, 10–11 a.m.