Walking-with to re-orient

WHEN: May 29th, 2026, 15:00-19:00

WHERE: Mz* Baltazar’s Lab, Jägerstraße 52-54, 1200 Wien

What to Bring: Comfortable walking shoes, curiosity, and an open mind. All materials for writing and creating will be provided.

Registration: workshop@speis.net

ABOUT

At the end of May, we will meet at Baltazar to think, talk, share and walk together — in and about space.

The concept of space and how we perceive it isn’t neutral and has changed fervently throughout history. A Eurocentric understanding of space is rigid, geometrical, it renders places into landscapes, to be expanded into and extracted from.

Such an understanding of space turned into perception, amplified through the technologies we use, until it became almost obsolete, our main source of orientation.

We will try out ways to re-orient, question our perception of space together and craft ways to walk and sense otherwise.

Light has been used to expand and shape colonial narratives over land and bodies. So, technologies of light will guide our storytelling and aid a re-narration.

What to Expect?

In the first part of the workshop, we will think-through and discuss about images, models and narrations, which grounded the way we look and how our technologies of vision developed hand-in-hand with specific ways of representing the world. How do things like cartography, satellite imaging, optics and geometry design and define space today? And how do our bodies move, sense and orient in such a space?

To look and to see are two quite distinct practices. In the second part of the workshop, we will practice both and compare the outcomes.

There will be reading and writing and drawing. And hopefully sun, but rain won’t stop us either!

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is perfect for anyone interested in exploring public spaces through a creative lens—writers, artists, and those curious about connecting narrative and materiality in new ways. No prior experience is needed, we will figure everything out as we go

What languages?

All languages are welcome in the creative process. We will try to translate between each other.

English as a working language during the WS (reading, basic communicating).

Italian and Slovenian.

About Dunia Sahir

Dunia Sahir is a Slovenian-Italian-Moroccan research-led transdisciplinary artist and scientist based in Vienna, who works with several mediums to investigate practices of knowledge-making, emphasizing the importance of emotions, memory, and ancestral knowledge in the process. Their poetic inquiries tackle established boundaries to confront the passively accepted limitations they impose.

Dunia’s work often crosses these boundaries to highlight their irony. Combining a profound knowledge of natural sciences with theoretical and geopolitical analysis, as well as history, Dunia focuses on intuition and the stickiness of embodied feeling and sense-making that intertwines all of these fields.