׳Clay Play׳ took part in "culture connected", an Austria-wide initiative of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.

The collaboration between ‘Clay play’ and culture contact took place during April 2019, in Allgemein bildende höhere Schule, Bundesgymnasium Ödenburger Straße, Wien.

 

The project involves dance and movement exploration in relation to science, in particular it focused on aspects in cognition studies.The goal of the project is to present to the students composition methods in contemporary art, focusing on dance and visual arts, while giving rise to an interdisciplinary connection between art and science. 

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Through physical exploration we study the interface possibilities of body and material. By using 300 Kilograms of clay to create different structures and surfaces such as: A tunnel, ‘boots’, which is a base for the legs, a wide stage, sleeves for the arms, a mask, and so forth. During the construction process and the outcome structures, we experiment and focus on the physicality of our body, in relation to the object, i.e the clay. 

We connect the kinesthetic experience, of the students, to a conceptual knowledge of related topics in cognition, by using the embodied cognition pedagogy, a cognitive science paradigm that rejects philosophical dissociations of brain and body. According to this approach, the mind is an activity distributed over the body, the environment, society, and culture.