“Everyone is an artist…”
-Joseph Beuys
Research
Workspace Social Sculpture is also a space for ongoing artistic and pedagogical research. We explore how aesthetic and embodied practices can give rise to forms of knowledge that are difficult to access through traditional methods. Our approach to research is not about collecting data from others, but about creating shared spaces of inquiry rooted in lived experience. In this way, the studio becomes a place where new questions, patterns, and possibilities can emerge, supporting both individual learning and institutional change.
Dialogue
At its heart, Workspace Social Sculpture is a practice of dialogue. We understand dialogue not just as conversation, but as a way of being with others that invites listening, presence, and mutual transformation. Rather than aiming for agreement or resolution, the work creates conditions where difference can be held with care. Through silence, movement, and shared attention, participants begin to experience dialogue as something that happens not only through words, but through space, rhythm, and relation.
Consulting
In addition to our studio-based work, Workspace Social Sculpture offers a consulting practice for organisations and institutions. Our approach supports groups in exploring the relational and cultural dynamics that shape their work, especially those held in tension or contradiction. We do not offer quick fixes or predefined solutions. Instead, we co-create processes that invite careful attention, reflection, and honest conversation. By engaging with paradox and embodied presence, we help groups navigate complexity with greater depth and care.
Join us on the floor…
Who are we…
Lotte van den Berg is a Dutch theatre-maker and artistic researcher. She is the founder of Building Conversation, a long-running international project exploring conversation as a form of collective art. Her work has been presented in universities, theatres, and public spaces across Europe and beyond, and focuses on dialogical aesthetics and the choreography of encounter.
Matthew Rich-Tolsma is a South African artist-educator, researcher, and consultant. His organisational and community work across multiple sectors and geographies spans critical pedagogy, decoloniality, group analysis, artistic research, and Nonviolent Communication. He is committed to creating spaces where epistemic justice, collective presence, and deep listening can flourish.
Keeping the complex complex…
Joseph Beuys
Drawing on Joseph Beuys’ conviction that “everyone is an artist” and that social life itself can be shaped as a form of art, this work invites participants to view the institution not as a static system, but as a space of ongoing relational creation. The work approaches learning as a living process—a sculptural and collective act in which presence, gesture, rhythm, and attention have the power to reshape culture from within.
Critical Pedagogy
The theoretical foundation of Workspace Social Sculpture is rooted in critical pedagogy, particularly in the work of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, and bell hooks. Freire insists that education must involve naming the world in order to change it. hooks expands this call into the affective, spiritual, and embodied realms, arguing for an “engaged pedagogy” that honours vulnerability, co-presence, and the full humanity of learners and educators alike.
Decoloniality
Our orientation challenges the legacies of coloniality in knowledge production, institutional structures, and relational life. Drawing on thinkers such as Mignolo, Spivak, and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, as well as indigenous epistemologies, the work resists the universalising assumptions of Western modernity, honouring plural ways of knowing and being, and attending to the often invisible wounds of epistemic violence.
