Building Conversation: Thinking Together – an Experiment

About

We declare love with words, we declare wars with words, and we raise our children with words. From birth to death, a person uses approximately eight billion words. We read and hear five times more. We use 4.400 sentences daily, during 21 conversations. Human culture is all about conversation and speaking. Europe is a conversation, the Netherlands are a conversation, we are a conversation. Building Conversation is an exercise. Building Conversation is like a collective free dive; you engage in conversation with others without knowing where you will end up. Building Conversation is run by a collective of artists, all in their own way fascinated by what happens when we meet in conversation. Inspired by conversation techniques from all over the world, they execute and perform different conversations together with the participants in cities all over Europe. How do we speak? How do we deal with words? How successful, smart, aggressive or loving are we in conversation? Building Conversation does exactly that: it focuses on the way we speak. Outside our daily reality, free from existing tensions, free from our striving towards expedience, we create a space in which we can practice conversation. We invite you to join in. Building Conversation has been developed by a collective of artists and executed and held by a growing group of people who are all fascinated by what happens when we meet in conversation. The mission of Building Conversation is to contribute to a moving and changing society, a society in which we practice in agility of thinking and feeling. In order to achieve this, we create conditions in which an exchange of perspectives can be practiced in conversation. We create a practise-space that allows you to let go of existing patterns of action, to experience different ways of acting and how these affect us. By doing so, we investigate and discover how we should and can talk to each other. Building Conversation was initiated by Lotte van den Berg and Daan‘t Sas and has grown into a collective of botanicals, philosophers, activists and affiliates. All fascinated by what happens when you meet in conversation. The group brings the following two conversations out of the whole series: Thinking Together – an Experiment and Conversation without words. -------------------------------------- THINKING TOGETHER – AN EXPERIMENT Inspired by the theory of quantum physicist David Bohm Thinking Together – an Experiment is based on the theory and practice of the American quantum physicist David Bohm, who maintains that there is a self-regulating mechanism within any group of people that allows large groups of people to speak without a moderator. David Bohm claims that you never think alone and that your thinking is always related to the thoughts of others. According to him, conversation is a place where you can investigate and readjust the patterns of this collective thinking with each other. As a quantum physicist, he was interested in the chaos and underlying order exhibited by small moving particles. Later in life, he became interested in the chaos and underlying order in our thinking and speaking, and he called for carrying out conversations in which the chaos, frustration and irritations can be seen. ‘People tend to think of common consciousness as a “shared bliss”. That may come; but if it does, I’m saying that the road to it goes through this. We have to share the consciousness that we actually have. We can’t just impose another one. But if people can share their frustration and share their different contradictory assumptions and share their mutual anger and stick with it – if everyone is angry together – then you have a common consciousness.’ In Czech (5/10) and in English (6/10) Tickets can only be purchased for each of the conversations separately and it is not possible to attend both conversations simultaneously.