The Learning Body

The many contradictions of modernity are also evident in the way bodies are treated. In addition to efforts to sensitize the human body, to reconnect it with seemingly primal "forces of nature" and to free it from social constraints, the body also became the learning object of industrial-pathological conditioning. Body and organism were made docile, functionally fitted into work processes such as assembly line work. Through such automated movement processes, a modification or deformation of the human body took place and still takes place. What standardization grids, what forms of fitting and adaptation, do we apply to our understanding of human bodies? The human body as a kind of learning tool, between play, sport and retrievable performance, is the focus of this experimental research and cooperation project.

In collaboration with Oliver Klimpel and Anne Schneider of the cultural mediation of the curatorial workshop of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Corina Forthuber and students of the teaching subject "Design: Technology.Textiles" of the University Mozarteum Salzburg work on the history of ideas of the learning body and undertake experiments that explore memory abilities and physical action and sensory perception. By modifying bodies, students investigate and shift automated behavior and alter familiar relationships between body and space.  The results of this project will be on display in the experimental space of the Bauhaus Museum for one year.