Come to Your Senses: Workshop & Book Launch
Seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing, feeling. After early education, sensory skills are rarely trained directly – yet they remain at the heart of how we learn, communicate and create. The makers of Come to Your Senses invite you to rediscover and develop these abilities through hands-on exercises, critical reflection, and playful experimentation.
During this evening, Emilie Sitzia and Elene Kadagidze introduce the book Come to Your Senses, based on exercises that were carried out at Maastricht University from 2021-2024, as part of the Senses-based Learning project. For the publication, illustrator Tânia Alexandra Cardoso transformed years of workshops into illustrated step-by-step instructions to show how to realize each exercise in a fun, visual manner. Tânia will tell you more about the illustration process. How do you turn academic texts and workshops into a comic book?
Following the presentation, we will shift from listening to doing, and begin the workshops. Together with Emilie, Elene and Tânia we explore the senses through playful exercises: describing a body part first through sound, then touch, then sight, letting perception unfold in layers. After this warm up, we will trace taste, texture and memory in the Cookie Explosion workshop. Gathering our impressions of the taste and feel of the cookie dough, we shape them into a shared creation – a poem, a rap, a song. We end by reflecting on how to bring this sensory attentiveness back into our daily lives and practices. What new ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing might emerge when we do?
Come to Your Senses is available at the nai010 webshop and in your local bookstore. The book will also be for sale before and after the workshops.
Together with Emilie Sitiza Special Chair at the University of Amsterdam (Word and Image) and is an Associate Professor Cultural Education at the University of Maastricht Elene Kadagidze Researcher & Arts and Heritage Professional Tânia Alexandra Cardoso Illustrator, architect and urbanist Kaspar Köning Interdisciplinary artist and designerAbout the speakers
Emilie Sitiza holds a special chair at the University of Amsterdam (Word and Image) and is an associate professor in cultural education at Maastricht University. She is a Comenius Leadership Fellow and PI of the research project Senses-based Learning (NRO funded). She is an advisory board member for the Koopman collection (KB) and an ambassador for the Illustration Embassy Amsterdam. She is currently the co-director of the Word-Image research group at the University of Amsterdam. Emilie specialises in museum participatory practices, the impact of art on audiences, word/image interdisciplinary studies (especially French nineteenth and early twentieth century), and digital and sensory education. Her research spans the fields of history, literary studies, art history, museology, cultural education, and sociology. She focuses on issues of storytelling, identity, and multimodality in space, in text, and in images.
Elene Kadagidze is a researcher, art historian, and educator. Elene has always been fascinated with the way we embody the spaces we’re in, the way our senses are developed over time, and how they’re more involved in our lives than we give them credit for. With a bachelor’s degree in art history and theory, and a master’s degree in arts and heritage, she strives to look at the senses and how they are interwoven in the fields of art and education, and how both fields benefit from the involvement of the senses in their practice. Elene was a part of the Senses-based Learning project from the beginning, during which she researched, designed, and implemented various sensory approaches to learning into university education.
Tânia Alexandra Cardoso is an illustrator, trained as an architect and urbanist. She completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam on “The Illustrated Cityscape”. Her innovative study, a product of her unique blend of fields, dives into the potential of illustration as a captivating form of urban communication. Drawing from her experience as an illustrator-researcher, she artfully explores the poetics of everyday life and reportage art, using her illustration work as reflections and redefinitions that challenge the urban environment, offering a fresh perspective and innovative methods. The results of her research led her to co-create the research group WARP with Prof. Alice Twemlow and to open StudioTako (www.studiotako.net) for creating visual storytelling, urban chronicles, research, collective mapping, and comics. Her work has been featured in several international exhibitions; most recently alongside her talented fellow Rotterdam artists in Drawn Rotterdam: May I Exist? at the Kunsthal Rotterdam.
Kaspar Köning is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who has been based in Zurich since 2012. With a background in design, sound art, and performance, he seamlessly integrates these disciplines to create works that resonate deeply with their context, environment, and audience. As a former professor of sound art and composition at the University of Music in Mainz, a researcher at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and a lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), König connects the audible elements of our surroundings with art, sustainability, and a zest for life.
More information Buy the book at nai010 publishersCome to Your Senses
A Senses-based Learning Guide
