Kevin Boardman is an artist, educator, and researcher. He specializes in drawing, sculpture, and arts pedagogy and holds an MA by Research from Manchester School of Art, UK. His work focuses on creating reusable 3D surfaces that facilitate radical thought and action. Kevin's artistic interests are centred around exploring alternative modes of thinking and reimagining spaces, objects, and situations, and delivering workshops and lectures focusing on collaborative approaches to creative thinking and making.
kevinboardman@outlook.com
Charlotta Ruth (S/A) works with choreographic systems, play, and collective thinking across media. Ruth holds a PhD from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and publishes, teaches, and facilitates internationally—often designing peer-to-peer formats and participatory settings that bridge artistic thinking, social engagement, and transdisciplinary collaboration.
charlotta@charlottaruth.com
Natalia Amelia Saied is an artist-educator based in Rotterdam, who graduated from the Master’s programme Education in Arts at Piet Zwart Institute. With more than 25 years of experience in performing arts, her professional practice encompasses education, performance, and creative production. Her current focus lies on facilitating participatory artistic interventions in dialogue with different contexts and contents.
mail@nataliaameliasaied.com
Instagram: @nanamelita
Jasmin Schaitl is a visual artist, performer, and facilitator working across Europe. She develops participatory, performative methods that merge touch, memory, and contemplation with cognitive science. Her work reveals hidden social, emotional, and historical structures, designing mind spaces that foster awareness through artistic, embodied, and interdisciplinary exploration.
jasmin.schaitl@uni-ak.ac.at
jasminschaitl.com
My practice sits between and across art and design, driven by an interest in reimagining spaces, objects, and situations as a way to provoke alternative modes of thinking and making. In this context, facilitation becomes both a keyword and an approach, contributing to an evolving practice that opens up possibilities for exploring multidisciplinary contexts.
For me, facilitation is performative, not didactic or centred on strong personalities, but subtle and adaptive. Influenced by my personality and sensitivity to group dynamics, it operates through a range of reclaimed objects and spaces for invitation—inviting others into spaces, processes, or conversations that encourage new perspectives and collective ideation. Facilitation often manifests through the creation of environments, tools, or prompts that support others in their own development or exploration.
My practice has included facilitation in various intentions including: facilitating through outcomes (creating spaces for others to develop), through rethinking objects or spaces (opening up new possibilities), or as a process (supporting early stages of ideation through methods like conversation, drawing, sculpture, or performative gestures). Lately, I’ve begun to view facilitation as an intervention that disrupts or reframes the usual into the alternative, and intended to explore this perception.
Project: Expanding artistic-pedagogic mark-making: thinking creatively with reusable 3D surfaces
This project broadly concerns the use of whiteboards to promote idea exploration and interventions. How might multi-dimensional whiteboards become spaces for radical thought and action that exceed current applications in education and business?
I have designed an ‘Art Kit’ for artistic pedagogical settings that introduced new approaches to ideation and shifts traditional student-teacher dynamics into more horizontal, collaborative ways of working. How can this facilitative quality extend beyond educational environments? Can these tools be adapted for other facilitative contexts? How might their potential unfold in different spaces?
The practice has evolved to include clothing, accessories, including a vest and a bag. As wearable, mobile whiteboards, they serve as an opening for new ideation, intervention, and facilitation. Their adaptability allows them to expand the possibilities of the whiteboard beyond the conventional 2D flat surface. Examples are Art Kit, Whiteboard Jacket, Improvised Production, and Methodology Mind Map.
Project: Paper Spaces– Parties, Meditation and New Opportunities
This practice concerns the use of paper for participatory applications. It considers how paper can be expanded beyond standard measurements and be transformed into new spaces and formats by covering rooms, objects and furniture to provide expanded approaches for creative applications. This practice often operates in Art & Design applications; however, experiments in social and home environments offer new openings for play, conversation and mediation.
New environments were made by covering rooms and furniture. Providing pens and paint, each new environment had different intentions and results. Examples include covering a living room in paper to facilitate a party, highlighting playful encounters and using alternative prompts for social interactions. Another example was covering furniture in a train station waiting room, leading to participants taking a moment to reflect and draw, and making a meditative space. In an art and design educational environment, students reconsidered drawing on a life-size scale. Other settings have been coffee shops, parks and exhibition spaces.
Central to my artistic work is the facilitation of transdisciplinary and collective spaces for thought. This fascination runs through everything I do—my artwork, my teaching, my cultural and political engagement, my exploration of digital technologies, my writing, and my artistic research. These spaces are activated through the friction between materials, ideas, and contexts. They take shape in the in-between: between different individuals’ knowledge and imagination, and in the temporal gap between questions and delayed, deepened, or creatively disoriented answers. I facilitate. I create the frame and hold the space for things to be explored, questioned, and reconfigured—whether I’m shaping an art experience, moderating a conversation, designing a format for transdisciplinary research exchange, or teaching. My profound curiosity for navigating our digital present has also guided my academic endeavors, encompassing media activism, game art, e-poetry, computational thinking and programming, with a particular emphasis on the facilitation of phygital (physical-digital) environments. The following pdf offers additional context.
Project: Hörselgång, Sound walk for two people by Daniele Pozzi & Charlotta Ruth
Hörselgång is a collaboration with sound artist Daniele Pozzi, initiated in the artistic research project simularr in 2023. The title Hörselgång suggests a speculative channel for listening through someone else’s ears. In Swedish, gång means “channel,” “walkway,” or “path,” while hörsel means “hearing.” The work combines spoken instructions and choreographic clues with binaural synthesis and heightened listening practices to explore the subjective, situated nature of auditory perception. It puts different models of perception into play and allows for a form of coexistence—inviting two participants at a time into a space that is not quite “inside” or “outside” the world, but rather “between.”
After receiving a vest and a brief equipment introduction, participants are told they may walk wherever they like—and they don’t need to stay together. They follow their ears and share them with their partner, effectively gaining two extra ears that are not in the same physical location. How participants engage with this emergent playfield varies greatly.
Upon returning, they are invited to reflect through drawing and associative writing. This debrief includes mapping their movement and translating distributed bodily sensations into language.
The sound walk premiered in 2024 as part of the Walking Strand at Alliances & Commonalities, Stockholm University of the Arts (October 2024), and has since been presented in international art festivals and artistic research contexts. Photo documentation comes from Alliances & Commonalities and the sound art festival Walls Have Ears, Tallinn, Estonia (February 2025).
photo credit: Charlotta Ruth
Further photo documentation: https://charlottaruth.com/live/horselgang
Development: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2357308/2357313
Simularr - Simultaneous Arrivals (FWF/PEEK AR 714) https://simularr.net
Risse/Cracks
Treasure Hunt / Writing Practice
Risse/Cracks was originally conceived as part of the work Treasure Hunting, created specifically for WUK—a large independent cultural centre housed in a historic 19th-century factory building in Vienna. In 2016, the corridors were filled with beautifully cracked old paint. Together with my collaborators, this sparked the idea of treasure hunting for cracks and peeled-off shapes that caught our attention.
The work invites participants to engage with a set of suggestions and note down words in a notebook—looking, feeling, smelling, and embodying the cracked material. These written reflections often turn poetic. Even word combinations that verge on emotional clichés acquire a more technical, grounded quality through the dramaturgy of how they were conceived.
Cracks played an important role in developing my facilitation practice and specially the work with clues. As the work evolved—first as a workshop, then mistakenly announced as a “performance” at a symposium—I became aware of how shifting contexts influenced my way of holding the experience. When shared with 40 participants as a “performance,” I found myself rehearsing my instructions and paying careful attention to how the materials were introduced and handed over.
This experience sparked a key reflection: how could I reduce my verbal input when facilitating, and instead let the materials (or props, in a performance setting) co-hold the space with me? This shift allowed the materials to become integral to the instructional structure of my choreographic clues.
Cracks has been presented at Earthbound Symposium (Aarhus, Denmark), MUMOK / MUMOK Moves (Vienna, Austria), and Research Pavilion #3 (Venice, Italy), and is frequently used in teaching contexts.
The image is from a park in Aarhus; further documentation from that occasion can be found here:
https://charlottaruth.com/live/cracks-1
Treasure Hunting: https://charlottaruth.com/live/treasure%20hunting/treasurehuntingwuk
photo credit: Simon Lange
My artistic practice is based on facilitating frameworks that explore corporeality as a territory of knowledge and transformation. My work invites audiences to re-experience and re-signify cultural spaces, with a particular emphasis on theaters and cultural centers. This practice has evolved through my background in dance, movement, and other creative endeavors, synthesizing these influences into a personal approach to audience engagement and learning. My work creates conditions for participants to access what I call a "third state" - a space where rational thinking meets instinctive and relational responses.
My methodology centers on three key elements: playfulness, safe space creation, and translations. Through carefully crafted prompts, I invite participants to gently transgress their habits and be curious about their choices. These "rules" serve not as restrictions but as doorways to spontaneity and discovery. By establishing an environment where "all answers are correct," while setting aside language and embracing our presence beyond words, participants feel a sense of agency to embrace discomfort and vulnerability, often encountering a subtle intimacy and potentially seeing symbolic relations.
Project: Belonginglessness
My belonginglessness has been a red thread throughout my life: a two-time immigrant by decision in search of improvement in my living conditions; a descendant of Polish and Syrian Jews who settled in Argentina escaping war and persecution. I have been the "other" time and time again, mostly for myself. Where do I belong to and to whom has been my ongoing life inquiry.
In a sense, I have given up trying to find a singular place or home. My identity is by negation – I do not. I am not property of, neither have many possessions. The closest it gets to an answer is naming the place where I was born, which I left almost 30 years ago. I appreciate the most the answer an 8 year-old boy gave when we talked about "where is home" – his mother tongue is his.
With this fleeting, elusive search, I return to the body to make sense, and ask, "How does it feel to belong?".
My intention in this project is to develop a format where belongingness is central, which is not an idea but knowing in the flesh. Is it possible to capture when one feels at home? Is there a somatic archive of gestures, trembles, whispers, touch, movements that ripple and become tangible, from within?
This work aims to create an opportunity for being in question collectively, acknowledging diverse lived experiences while fostering sensible conversations. It involves zooming in and out from contemporary issues of displacement and rights, in order to disentangle this fundamental aspect of human experience and return to the body as a site of (personal) knowledge.
In this approach, I seek collaboration with scholars and other creative thinkers to create a delicate space where nuances build introspection, reflection, and togetherness in a semi-performative, partly workshop like. A setting to be discovered.
Project: RSVP Cycles: On Creative Processes
Together with Dr. Thijs Witty, we embarked on joint research with the departure point of Lawrence and Anna Halprin's legacy in collective creative explorations. As a landscape designer and choreographer respectively, the Halprins shared long years intertwining family life, art, and research in ever-shifting ways. In their understanding of their practices, participation had a central role, and the creative growth was a common goal, both individually and collectively. For this reason, they developed an operational communicative structure now known as the RSVP cycle.
An RSVP cycle consists of four components: Resources, Scores, Valuaction, and Performance. The process is cyclical and can operate in any direction. While they always embraced the contingency of creative processes, they also observed a meaningful overcoming of obstacles (in decision-making, sharing intentions, finding aesthetic forms) when applying their model. An RSVP cycle recollects relevant materials and concerns of participants around a common topic.
In our research, we chose different settings to activate the Cycles – academic education, artistic research, cultural centers' audiences and staff. Each workshop, allows us to test a topic at hand through the tools the Cycle affords and ignite further use of the system for other instances. The process will be depicted in an article in autumn 2025.
My approach to facilitation is rooted in creating spaces—both physical and mental—that invite presence, agency, and reflective engagement. Since 2020, I have been developing participatory, performative methods that combine the sense of touch, the theme of memory, and contemplative practices. Rather than transmitting content, I design low-threshold, multi-sensory frameworks that enable individuals to co-create meaning and re-access positive personal memories as a source of strength and orientation.
Facilitation, to me, is the art of “holding space”: establishing environments that are carefully attuned to emotional, cognitive, and sensory presence. This act is not passive; it is a conscious, responsive shaping of conditions that reveal the existing potential for interaction and insight. In doing so, I aim to foster inclusive formats where people from all backgrounds—regardless of age or artistic experience—can engage meaningfully.
A core component of my practice is the creation of “mind spaces,” in which thoughts and emotions are treated as tangible, creative forces. Informed by somatic methods and neuroscientific research, I see these inner landscapes as fertile ground for transformation. Facilitation thus becomes a method of designing experiences that support intricate, autonomous learning and the cultivation of individual imagination, agency, and embodied knowledge.
Project: Performances of the Mind
My artistic research examines and highlights the importance, impact, and close connection of the sense of touch (Grunwald, Martin) to the capacity to remember and revisit past experiences in one’s own mind (Tulving, Endel). This foundational concept is informed by research into awareness practices that are scientifically shown to enhance present-moment focus through mindfulness and bodily attention (Kabat-Zinn, Jon; Davidson, Richard; Tang, Yi-Yuan et al.), as well as the mind’s ability to cultivate empathy by “training” the imaginative process (O’Connor, Brendan). The concept of “mental time travel” from cognitive neuroscience (Tulving) describes the human capacity to access past memories—enabled by uniquely human cognitive memory systems.
The artistic facilitation practice of Performances of the Mind enables participants to render this mental travel tangible through their bodies and minds by activating haptic awareness and concentration via performative exercises. One example is the creation of calm spaces and open timeframes, supported by voice or written guidelines (e.g., cards, QR codes, or spoken instructions), allowing participants to revisit joyful personal memories. This process requires active mental engagement and recognition of individual agency; memory can only be accessed through intentional, personal involvement.
Facilitated exercises and prepared environments function as catalysts for introspection and awareness. Yet without each individual’s internal memorization process, the artwork would not manifest. Its existence depends entirely on the participant’s mental presence and focus. The artwork is thus localized solely within the mind-body continuum of the participant.
Accordingly, the actual artistic “product”—the memory revisited through mental travel—remains invisible and intangible to the external world. Participants become both creators and witnesses of their own experiences. They are given autonomy to shape, activate, and reflect, gaining agency in the co-creation of the artwork (Breel, Astrid). In this sense, the artist’s role is redefined: from producer of material forms to facilitator of complex, vivid, yet immaterial situations.
The artistic facilitation lies in the creation of mental and physical spaces open for shared participation and engagement. It makes visible the perception of one's capacity to act, and supports an internal, imaginative journey. The act of remembering or thinking becomes performative—an invisible, yet powerfully embodied event.
Research in cognitive science (O’Connor, Brendan) shows that the capacity to imagine complex, multisensory scenarios enhances empathetic decision-making. As such, this facilitation practice resonates beyond the moment of the event, extending quietly into participants’ everyday lives and into broader social and global spheres.
- Link to handbook (PDF), a collection of exercises to train the mind, based on the concept of Performances of the Mind.
- Link to an exhibition that included Performances of the Mind as the base of creation: HANDS ON. Practicing Experience (2024, Solo exhibition, EXIT Gallery Wroclaw PL)
