Transmission in Motion

Seminar Blogs

“Institution as a Solution?” — Agata Kok

In Living a Feminist Life, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2017) states: “When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away,” noting that the act of naming injustice is often treated as the…

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“Rehearsing Institution” — Margot Van den Eeckhout

What stayed with me most from the session with Anne Breure was her way of thinking institutions as something that can be rehearsed. Breure described her graduation project as a proposal for a new institution. A reflection on what the world might look like in fifteen years and how a theatre could be organized differently…

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“BECOMING-HOUSE” — Nikita Chistov

Anne Breure is interested in the new. On the page of Theater Utrecht, where Breure has served as an artistic director since 2022, one finds her statement that “The power of theatre is that we constantly imagine a new world. Now we have a home where we continuously create worlds and ideas side by side….

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“The Web We Roam: Crafting Institutional Life” — Jilke van der Kolk

Institutions are often understood as fixed and abstract entities. They appear as stable structures shaped by policy and established procedures, leaving little room for imagination or creative intervention. From this perspective, institutions seem distant from artistic practice and resistant to change. During the Transmission in Motion seminar “On Institutionalizing Differently,” Anne Breure unsettled this view…

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“Outer Space as a Blind Spot” – Margot Van den Eeckhout

During the Transmission in Motion session on “Theater, Moon Studies, and Interplanetary Entanglements,” one sentence, spoken by Dr. Felipe Cervera, immediately activated me: “Why is theatre only about land politics?” The question lingered long after the session ended. It was striking not because it dismissed existing theatrical engagements with geopolitics, but because it exposed a…

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“This Is Not Fiction” – Agata Kok

Treating space as an object of inquiry within the Humanities may initially appear abstract (not to say absurd) – particularly when the focus shifts from science-fiction representations toward outer space itself: that is, toward our concrete interactions with and entanglements in the universe beyond Earth. However, as has been widely demonstrated, performances and performative actions…

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“Inside the Model: Thinking Knowledge through the Orrery” – Jilke van der Kolk

How can a tiny model of the solar system reveal the responsibility involved in knowing? This question stayed with me after the Transmission in Motion seminar on Theatre, Moon Studies, and Interplanetary Entanglements. Planetary knowledge is often imagined as distant, even though it is always grounded in specific materials and forms of mediation. Charles LeDray’s…

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“A Messy Race to Ou(te)r Space” – Thorn Austin

When we hear the word extraterrestrial, we often think of aliens, visitors from another planet, another galaxy, another world. But as humans explore deeper into the vastness of space the question arises, are we not, to some extent, also extraterrestrial? Thinking about ourselves as extraterrestrial beings dissolves the false separation between Earth and outer space…

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“Object Orientation: Initiating Interdisciplinary Conversation from an Object” – Jenny Chan

In the workshop “Frogs and Clowns: An Object Orientation of Protest Today”, Anneke Jansen (Theatre Programming, SPOT Groningen) and Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University) introduced ‘object orientation’ as a collaborative method that initiates interdisciplinary conversations. By using an object as a starting point, researchers collectively reflect on what kinds of perspectives arise from their…

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