Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song

Artists: Teresa Borasino, AZ OOR, Serena Lee, and Kristiina Koskentola

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons presents the 2025 spring program, Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song, featuring artistic proposals by Teresa Borasino, AZ OOR, Serena Lee, and Kristiina Koskentola.

The proposals presented in the exhibition and public program Sensing the Ways inquire into situated ways of knowing that emerge through body and movement, shaped by deep connections with the land, more-than-human life worlds, and spirit.

Integrating aesthetic, poetic, archival, and performative strategies, the artists’ works invite reflection on the possibilities that arise when knowing is reconceived as an embodied practice, one that is intimate and firmly rooted in emotional and reciprocal presence. Resisting forms of rationalization, they challenge modern/colonial epistemological frameworks.

Sensing the Ways further offers a thoughtful artistic consideration of the politics of knowledge regeneration. Tending to how the addressed knowledges move and are reshaped across generations, communities, and geographies, the artists assert the vitality of alternative epistemologies in the present and the need for their ongoing renewal.

How might attuning ourselves to sensory forms of knowing—generated through touch, story, movement, and song—bring about radical transformation? What might it mean to honour how knowledge travels and transforms across time, space, and being?

Teresa Borasino carefully explores Quelccaya, the world’s largest tropical glacier, in the Peruvian Andes. Now at the risk of disappearing—along with the Indigenous communities, ancestral practices, and knowledge systems, it sustains and that sustain it—Quelccaya bears the pain of ongoing colonial violence and escalating lithium extraction. Borasino’s video installation traces the pulse of this wounded glacier as a living organism, intertwining its presence with anti-colonial narratives.

AZ OOR’s practice centers on the Amazigh movement. It proposes speculative narratives to explore and highlight the transnational networks that advocate for the cultural rights and resistance of this Indigenous group. Through Issaffen n Irifi (Rivers of Thirst in Amazigh), a scenography and storytelling circle, AZ OOR confronts colonial legacies, extractivism, and environmental destruction.

Serena Lee opens up her artistic research on taijiquan, a martial art developed in China with both combat and health applications, as a way of thinking through moving. Transforming the space, she invites us to spend time with the questions raised through this embodied practice, within various atmospheres for collective study. Playing with invited study partners who practise in different modes, the project finds different ways to pose the question: How do we know what we know?

Kristiina Koskentola presents works that channel and intertwine ancient shamanic philosophy and practice with contemporary thinking and futurist visions. Developed in collaboration with Manchu shamanic composer Han Xiaohan, the artists have been working together on the Finnish-Russian border, specifically in Karelia, around Lake Saimaa, and in Manchuria’s Daxinganling region along the Amur River—a natural border between China’s Northeast and Russia’s Far East. The project delves into these practices within the Taiga landscapes, reflecting on resilient, interconnected knowledges. 

Sensing the Ways marks the beginning of Changing the Fabric of the Night Sky. Through various constellations of inherently relational practices, this multi-year initiative imagines beyond the world as we know it.

Sensing the Ways is made possible with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund, the City of Utrecht, Stichting DOEN via Arts Collaboratory, The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, The Canada Council for the Arts, and Culture Moves Europe by the European Union.