As practitioners we associate intimacy with closeness. When we do an exercise that immerses participants in an intimate experience, we say afterwards: Let’s take a step back and make sense of what this was about. The sensemaking process is typically a rational process that involves talking. We say thing like: it was about ‘this’ and not about ‘that.’ We make distinctions. We create boundaries. And we lose the intimacy of the experience.
The question I want to address in this workshop is: Can we make sense and stay intimately connected to the experience at the same time?
I will invite participants to paint each others portraits using a brush attached to a long stick. Working this way we have the intimacy of the experience of painting but also have a overview of what we are doing. This experiment is about creating an embodied experience of sensemaking that does not foreground our rational minds.
