A two-day event exploring embodied knowledge, attention and our connection to the living world.

Meaning emerges through our embodied interactions with the world. It is shaped by the places we inhabit, the people we encounter and the living environment of which we are a part. Yet in an increasingly digital and technologically mediated culture, we are becoming more distanced from our bodies and from the world around us. As artificial intelligence takes on an ever greater role in our lives, the question of what it means to know and understand the world through our own lived experience becomes increasingly important.

Attending to the Liminal brings together philosopher Claire Petitmengin, biologist and writer Andreas Weber, and artist and filmmaker Tereza Violet Stehlíková to explore how cultivating embodied attention can open up new ways of perceiving, experiencing and understanding the world.

Through talks, conversations, meditation and immersive artistic experiences, this two-day event invites us to slow down, reconnect with our senses and become more attentive to the subtle relationships between ourselves and our surroundings. Together, we will explore what becomes possible when we attend more closely to the often-overlooked dimensions of our experience.

Monday, November 9, 6:00–9:00 PM

6:00 PM Doors open, arrivals and informal gathering

6:30 PM Tereza Violet Stehlikova: Tangible Territory — Introduction to the event and the ideas behind it and the journal.

7:00 PM Claire Petitmengin: Anchoring in Lived Experience

This presentation will focus on a dimension of our experience that has received little recognition and little study, and that does not even have a name. Petitmengin will refer to it as the “felt dimension” of experience. Drawing on descriptions of concretely lived experiences, we will explore its various characteristics, as well as the “inner gestures” that make it possible to recognize this dimension and become aware of it. Petitmengin will then put forward the hypothesis that many of today’s societal problems may be rooted in a loss of contact with this dimension, and that restoring this contact has become a major societal concern.

8:00 PM Andreas Weber: Being is Knowing

In this presentation Weber will claim that the heart of our everyday experience – our feeling of being alive – grants us a continual, and easy access to the deep character of reality – of being which is knowing. Weber will argue that life – and each of us within it – is the manifestation of this deep character. It is matter that experiences its own existence, matter that is shared among all players in the ecosystem of reality, and that is continually received as a gift. The character of reality is not hidden, nor remote, it rather forms the center of our existence. It cannot be lost, even though the individual body will perish. Ecosystems display this deep character, as they are embodied experience, which comes to be through the continued gift of life, and we know them through embodied experiential participation, or the exchange of breath. Contrary to the belief dominating the global technological culture that we cannot know what reality is and that we can never be in touch with its deep being, Weber claims that we already know, and we already act as this foundational reality, which is profoundly life-giving and loving.

Tuesday, November 10, 10:00 AM – 4:30 PM

10:00 AM – 1:00 PM When I Was the Hill: Asking Petřin to Allow us into Sheer Life
In this session of meditative practice facilitated together with Petřin, the hill on Malá Strana, on the left bank of the Vltava river, Andreas Weber will invite into a shared experience that can potentially allow participants to go beyond our individual perspectives and plunge us into the plane of experience-as-being, or sheer life. If the weather allows, the session will be partly outdoors (appropriate clothing recommended).  REGISTRATION FORM

2:30–4:00 PM Attending to Transmodal Experience: An Introduction to the Interview Method
Claire Petitmengin will offer an introduction to her interview method and to exploring the “transmodal” sensory dimension of experience. Through a facilitated collective exercise or work in small groups, participants will be invited to attend closely to the subtle textures and transformations of lived experience. The session will last approximately one to two hours, with the possibility of spending part of it outdoors. REGISTRATION FORM

Tangible Territory (TT journal) is an interdisciplinary journal and platform exploring the role of our senses and embodied experience in how we perceive, understand and relate to the world. Bringing together artists, scientists, philosophers and other thinkers, it creates a space for dialogue and experimentation across disciplines, investigating the complex relationships between our bodies, our environments and the wider living world. Through essays, conversations, artistic projects and live events, TT invites us to rediscover the richness of sensory experience and cultivate more attentive, imaginative and reciprocal ways of engaging with the world.

Claire Petitmengin is currently Professor Emerita in Philosophy at the Institut Mines-Télécom and member of the Archives Husserl, Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her research focuses on the usually unrecognized dynamics of lived experience and “micro-phenomenological” methods enabling us to become aware of it and highlight its essential structures. She studies the epistemological conditions of these methods, as well as their educational, therapeutic, artistic and contemplative applications. She currently devotes herself to exploring the links between the ecological crisis and our blindness to our lived experience, notably in the context of the Laboratory of Micro-phenomenology, an international “without walls” community, gathering researchers involved in micro-phenomenological research.

Andreas Weber (*1967) is a biologist, philosopher, writer and Sufi mystic. He has worked with Francisco Varela and developed the idea of „Biopoetics“, a view of life as subjective, felt and poetically expressive from the very beginning. Andreas is visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG), Pollenzo, Italy, and at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), Portland, Maine, US. He has published more than fifteen books translated in several languages, in English The Biology of Wonder. Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (2016), Biopoetics (2016), Matter & Desire. An Erotic Ecology (2017), Enlivenment. Towards a Poetics of the Anthropocene (2019), Sharing Life. An Ecopolitics of Reciprocity (2020), and Butterfly Means Soul (2026).

Tereza Violet Stehlíková is a Czech-British artist, filmmaker, writer and researcher whose work explores the role of our senses and embodied experience in shaping how we perceive and understand the world. Working across moving image, installation and participatory performance, she investigates the relationship between the body, memory, imagination and the environments we inhabit. Her practice is informed by interdisciplinary collaborations with artists, scientists and philosophers, exploring how artistic experiences can open up new ways of knowing and relating to the world. She is the founder and editor of Tangible Territory (TT) journal and the author of Exiled from Our Bodies: How to Come Back to Our Senses (Routledge, 2025).