The Witness Openlab:
Worlding Through Socially Engaged Art Practice

The Witness¹ is a transdisciplinary artistic project initiated and led by Swiss artist and director Julie Beauvais, a platform aimed at fostering ecological awareness and interconnectedness among worldwide communities. By establishing a global network of artist-researchers, scientists, and activists, the project encourages participants and audiences to critically engage with their surroundings and highlight pressing ecological and social concerns. At its core, The Witness draws inspiration from Pauline Oliveros’ score The Witness (Oliveros 2013), emphasizing not only the act of listening but also the profound significance of witnessing the intricate relationships between humans, non-human entities, and the environment. This paper explores the outcomes of The Witness Openlab, which served as a platform for twelve emerging artists and students to immerse themselves in artistic research centered around deep listening practices, embodiment, and community-building.

The Witness Openlab took place under the umbrella of the Witness global project during the fall semester of 2023, representing the final test phase for a newly created Master of Arts in Music and Scene in Transformation, starting 2024/2025 at the Basel Academy of Music/ FHNW (Switzer­land). The Witness Openlab provided an immersive learning environment where twelve young artists and students could expand their practice into the field of artistic research, emphasizing the importance of embodied and spiritual engagement with the communities they are part of. This expansion of artistic practice involved the attunement not only to the self, but also to the other—both human and non-human—and to the world at large. This attunement is built on the foundational practices of deep listening and mutual care, echoing the philosophy of being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1962), or making sense of the world through lived experience.

Two key projects emerged from this process, offering insights into two distinct forms of interconnectedness: human-human and human-other-than-human. From this point onward, I will employ the first-person plural to reflect my direct involvement and active participation in The Witness Openlab project, and to represent the collective experience and perspectives of the groups involved.

• The Urban Witnesses project explored the trans- and cross-border communities around Basel, having as focal points the Dreiländerbrücke (Three-Countries-Bridge) connecting France with Germany and overlooked by the Swiss Drei­län­der­eck, and the border area between Switzerland and Germany, where the Federal Asylum Center of Basel is placed. By engaging with these communities, we sought to foster a deeper understanding of shared identity and the ways in which borders—both physical and symbolic—shape our lives. Through this process, we challenged conventional perspectives on globalization and technology, seeking instead to create a more interconnected, humane way of co-existing across boundaries.

• The Soil Witnesses project, on the other hand, turned its attention to the natural world, specifically the biodiversity found in the gardens of Basel. Through this project, we investigated how human and non-human lives are entangled and co-created. By amplifying the significance of these natural spaces, we aimed to embody how human art practices can respond to and critically engage with the more/other-than-human world.

Both projects were extensively documented through multimedia works: videos, field recordings, interviews, performances, sound pieces, animations, and poetry. This variety of media allowed us to capture the worlds we were engaging with from a complex spectrum of perspectives.

Embodied Worlding as Artistic Research

By investigating the two key projects—the Urban Witnesses and the Soil Witnesses—this paper reveals how the practices of embodiment and deep listening inform our understanding of interconnectedness, facilitating new narratives that advocate for both personal and collective ecological consciousness, also known as “worlding” (a term associated with the phenomenological and feminist thought in the works of Martin Heidegger [1962] and Donna Haraway [2016]), at the same time also acknowledging the shortcomings of focusing on a unilateral approach to artistic research methodologies.

Martin Heidegger coined the term “worlding” (das Welten) to explain how the world is constituted through Dasein’s being-in-the-world (in‐der‐Welt‐sein), not as a static background but as an ongoing, historical unfolding in which human existence shapes and discloses meaning. The Dasein itself is described as situated in a network of meaningful relations—tools, others, possibilities—that define the world’s structure, showing how world emerges through our embedded practices, moods, and social norms. Haraway’s approach on the other hand is deeply embedded in feminist science studies, multispecies thinking, and ecological crisis response. This approach uses worlding as a verb to denote co‑making worlds across species, stories, technologies, and ecologies—an active, embodied, material‑semiotic practice that rejects singular, human-centered universes.

Both approaches to worlding are directly relevant to the practices and insights developed within our group, and they will be highlighted throughout the paper.

Embodiment. How to Create the World.

In the context of the Openlab, embodied practices served as a vital method for artistic research and collective engagement, transforming the body into an active medium of exploration and understanding. Through its immersive and relational character of being-in-the-world, this approach functions complementary to purely cognitive research, fostering a deeper connection to oneself, the community, and the surrounding environment.

Embodiment/embodied cognition refers to the way our bodies are central to our experience of the world (Varela et al. 1991). Embodied cognition posits that the mind arises from the body’s interactions with its environment, suggesting that our physical, sensory, and motor systems play a vital role in shaping cognition and perception, while stressing that the body is not a passive vessel but an active agent in knowing the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology deeply informs embodied cognition by showing that our bodily presence in the world is not something separate from perception and thought. It is the very foundation of them (Merleau-Ponty 2012).

In the context of the Openlab, embodiment involved incorporating both individual and collective physical presence within our research environments and heightened sensory awareness of the body as fundamental elements of artistic research and engagement. Through activities like sonic meditations, bodily movement, and sensory interaction with the environment, embodiment becomes a way to deepen connection, both to oneself and to the communities and ecosystems involved.

Deep Listening and Embodiment: A Symbiotic Relationship

Deep listening, a practice developed by composer and musician Pauline Oliveros (2005) was one of the primary ways we explored embodiment. The “method” encourages individuals to cultivate mindfulness and awareness of their auditory environment, fostering a deep sensitivity to both external and internal sounds. By exploring various sound sources—including the body, instruments, and the surrounding environment—and with a focus on improvisation and collaboration, participants engage with the sounding world in a profound way, promoting a richer understanding of the interplay between sound, space, and human experience. In her work, Oliveros speaks of the body as an instrument for perceiving and responding to the world. Her invitation to “[t]ake a walk at night, walk so silently that the bottom of your feet become ears” (Oliveros 1974a) calls for a heightened awareness where the body is not separate from the environment but co-emerges with it through listening.

This notion became a core part of The Witness Openlab, where we integrated bodily awareness into listening practices. As a form of collective practice, yoga, deep listening and meditation, as well as embodied dramaturgy and games have been key components of the methodology of group forming and cohesion. Through these practices, embodiment became not only a personal experience but a collaborative tool. By engaging our bodies in shared activities, we developed a form of mutual awareness, where each participant’s presence affected the collective dynamic. This echoes the notion of distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995; Rogers and Hazlewood 2008), where intelligence and creativity are shared across individuals, not confined to the mind of one. Through bodily practices, we achieved autonomy in our creative roles while maintaining a deep connection with others, fostering new ways of creating together.

Translating Practice Into the World

Performing Pauline Oliveros' Scores in Research Environments

In line with our focus on embodiment, we performed some of Pauline Oliveros’ scores in the specific environments we were researching: on the Three-Countries-Bridge (Fig. 1) and in a garden of Basel.² These performances emphasized how the body could serve as a vessel for listening and as a tool for creating meaning. The process of performing in different spaces—whether natural or urban—allowed us to explore the boundaries between self, body, and world, blurring the lines between them and fostering a more integrated understanding of our surroundings. The scores helped us to practice embodied awareness, where listening extended beyond the ears and into the full sensory apparatus of the body.

The Bridge: Embodied Listening and Reflection

For the students participating in the Urban Witnesses group, embodiment emerged through the practice of deep listening and community engagement in the transborder area around Basel. The embodied experiences of navigating city spaces, interacting with people (whether people crossing the Three-Countries-Bridge, asylum seekers or NGO workers in the area), and crossing borders (physical and symbolic) have been key to understanding the broader themes of identity, technology, and globalization.

One of the most significant explorations of embodiment for the urban witnesses was our experience on the bridge, performing Environmental Dialogues by Pauline Oliveros (Oliveros 1974b), a symbolic site for our practice. Here, we experimented with the act of listening and reflection, not just through verbal dialogue but through bodily presence. We explored how laying on the bridge for an extended time—situated physically between spaces—enabled us to feel the tension, movement and connection between two places, between self and other. The bridge symbolizes a space of uprootedness and a longing for belonging, challenging essentialist views by revealing that borders are human-made constructs that categorize and separate.

Although the body actively participates in shaping our understanding of these complex social and cultural phenomena, embodiment alone is not enough. Focusing primarily on bodily experience risks overshadowing other valuable ways of knowing, like intellectual or symbolic interpretation, which contributed important insights to our artistic research. Through exploring local narratives, conducting interviews, and engaging with sociological research, this varied approach highlighted the importance of abstract and relational forms of knowledge. These different methods allow for a broader, more nuanced understanding of the complexities that define transnational spaces.

For the participants in the Soil Witnesses group, embodiment is central to how the artists connect with the biodiversity present in Basel’s urban gardens. Through deep listening and in line with ecosomatic practices (Gold­man 2024)³, the artists immerse themselves physically in the soil’s ecosystems, engaging with the plants, animals, and microbiomes that flourish there. Ecosomatic practices constitute an embodied methodology that integrates somatic awareness with ecological consciousness, positioning the human body as fundamentally interconnected with broader environmental systems. This approach synthesizes body-based inquiry with ecological engagement, challenging anthropocentric boundaries between self and environment through direct, experiential practice. The group’s approach to embodiment involved not just observing nature but actively inhabiting it—using their bodies to “listen” and attune to the rhythms, textures, and relationships found in these ecosystems, feeling the vibrancy of the microbiomes and the earth itself (Fig. 2).

Worlding Through the Body: Insects and Microbiomes

An important exercise involved engaging with the world of insects and microbiomes through the body (Fig. 3). By paying attention to the subtle movements within our bodies, such as the sounds of borborygmus—the rumbling of the gut—we realized how our inner bodily processes reflect the larger ecosystems we inhabit. This practice allowed us to think about worlding not as an abstract process but as something that happens within and through our bodies in relation to other living beings. By turning inward and attending to the movements within us, we expanded our awareness of the entanglements between human and non-human worlds.⁴

By “worlding” through these embodied practices, the group aimed at breaking down the conventional human-nature divide, emphasizing interconnectedness. Whether through movement, breathwork, or creative improvisation, the artists’ physical engagement with the earth mirrors the interwoven nature of their research and the living world they explore. Through this embodied approach, they translate ecological insights into artistic expression, facilitating a profound sense of presence and care for the environment around them.

However, it is important stating that beyond the experiential approach of the group, the research developed from a top-down perspective, following a thread traced by ecology and feminist science (through the work of Lynn Margulis [1981] and Donna Haraway [2008]), where research methodologies from both artistic and scientific domains were used to cultivate a multidimensional understanding of biodiversity. While the project emphasizes sensory and embodied engagement, it also parallels scientific observation techniques (like biomimicry), providing with a sense of grounding the artworks and experiences in observable ecological phenomena and encouraging participants to explore scientific concepts through creative practice.

The Openlab encouraged the students and young artists to engage in a process of “worlding”, where new relationships between participants, communities, and environments were fostered. The group began to view the world not as something static, but as something to create with, to negotiate roles, awareness, and care within their practice, whether research-based, artistic or personal.

Martin Heidegger spoke of worlding as the process of coming into being within a world that is always in flux, in the process of being shaped by our actions, choices, and perceptions; it is the world that reveals itself through a process of clearing (Lichtung) or unconcealment (aletheia), allowing individuals to encounter and explore without predefined limits or structured paths (Heid­egger 1962). This idea can be applied to The Witness Openlab participants in the Urban Witnesses group structure of inquiry and collaborative practice, where participants entered the artistic process with a sense of openness, without fixed outcomes and discovering meaning emergently. The initial discomfort with “not knowing” was balanced by the embodied approach and became a method for encountering the project themes of social interconnection in ways that were visceral, tangible, and phenomenologically grounded. This led to a more comprehensible and complex view of the theme, by including perspectives from sociological research and critical reflection.

Instead of focusing on human-centered narratives, Donna Haraway encourages a view of the world that acknowledges the agency and participation of non-human organisms in shaping ecological and social realities, suggesting radical interdependence (Haraway 2008; Haraway 2016). For the Soil Group, the act of exploring urban biodiversity in Basel’s gardens exemplifies this worlding perspective. Their work magnifies the unseen or overlooked lives of various species thriving in urban spaces, embodying Haraway’s idea that “worlding” involves witnessing and participating in the “ongoing story” of interdependent relationships between species. By centering their art around these non-human narratives, the Soil Group brings to light the complexity of ecosystems that sustain urban life, fostering an ecological awareness that Haraway advocates for: a recognition that all beings are co-participants in a shared world and a commitment to learning how to live with others—human and non-human—by respecting their agency, rights, and roles in the shared processes of life.

The group’s use of embodiment practices and multisensory documentation—including soundscapes, improvisations, and visual art—enables them to engage with the garden as a dynamic participant rather than merely an object of study. However, this raises a critical question: do these practices genuinely transform the artist into a participant within the ecosystem, or do they remain fundamentally in an observer role? Furthermore, it is worth examining how ecosomatic practices either integrate or overlook scientific knowledge about these ecosystems. A more intentional balance between artistic and scientific approaches might deepen ecological understanding beyond what subjective sensory experience alone can provide.