This workshop invites participants to playfully explore how materials leave their mark on the environment and how we can perceive, map, and “measure” these marks in different ways. We work with soft and malleable materials—such as bubbles, foam, dough, or other living, transforming, fermenting matter—and observe how the relationships between the body and the surrounding environment become visible within and through them.

Rather than technical monitoring, the workshop conceives of perception as a collective practice of attunement. Softness is a method of exploration that does not fix meaning but allows subtle traces, imprints, rhythms, and changes in texture, taste, smell, and moisture to emerge. Through playful exercises, material experiments, and collective reflection, participants will create informal maps, scores, or records of their encounters with the material.

The workshop draws on the long-term artistic research practice of the artist duo sikau/půbalová, which focuses on multisensory perception, microbial relationships, and the question of how environmental transformations can be tasted, smelled, and touched. The program aims to foster a slow, shared development of sensitivity toward what we normally overlook.

Denisa Půbalová is an artist, researcher, and creative programmer who works as part of the artistic duo sikau/půbalová. In her process-oriented practice, she develops multisensory methods for attuning to socio-ecological incommensurability, including the relationships between people, fungi, and technologies; diatom climate archives; and microbiomes connecting the gut and the soil. In her work, she intertwines posthumanist philosophy, environmental humanities, speculative fiction, and collaborative field research. She creates installations, publications, and participatory tools that open up space for bodily, material, and non-human modes of knowing.

Venue: Tyršův dům – TYRŠ the human lab