ART AS THERAPY

The workshop is based on the interest in the “psychic life of plants” and the philosophy of vegetaI life, starting from Aristotle, who proposed that plants have souls, and from the German psychophysicist Gustav Theodor Fechner, who maintained in 1848 that plants have emotions and that they react to human attention, talk and affection. Later, experimental research on plants has brought forth that plants react to different kind of music and sounds, as well as to stress, danger and pain-evoking stimuli, signaling it to other plants. Plants support life and the whole ecosystem. The Plant Bill of Rights has been formulated in Switzerland, stating that plants have moral and legal protections. These new topics will give us challenges to reflect on our existential and spiritual relations and obligations to the life-supporting, pulsating and communicating plants. 

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For the outdoor work, this workshop calls for relating one's self to freely-chosen plants by writing on, around and into the plants and their life span, and taking (individually, in pairs or in small groups) plant-selfie videos with performance enacting some events, encounters and situations of the plants' or the plant's life span.

 

Performance (both live and on video), the plant-selfie videos (by camera phones, digital cameras, iPad cameras, etc.) and plant poems/short narratives/scripts/dialogues/monologues will be shared and discussed in the workshop. This demands that the videos can be seen on a screen. Thus, the workshop will include and combine - in alternate order - performance, video and writing, and, of course, identifying with the plants and their life history by letting the plant-selfies enact and talk about their life, feelings, thoughts, fantasies, desires, memories and relations.

 

 

Juhani Ihanus, PhD, is currently Adjunct Professor of Cultural Psychology (at the University of Helsinki), of Art Education and Art Psychology (at Aalto University) and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Open University of the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is a chief of several continuing education training programs in biblio-poetry therapy since 1989. He is a founder, the first president and an honorary member of the Finnish Association for Biblio-Poetry Therapy, the first such organization in Europe.He is a member of the Editorial Board of The Arts in Psychotherapy,Journal of Poetry Therapy, Journal of Psychohistory and Scriptum: Creative Writing Studies, a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Psykoterapia, and a reviewer of several journals. Ihanus is an author for over 430 publications (in Finnish, English, Swedish and German), including refereed articles in scientific journals, refereed book articles, 12 books, 11 edited books, as well as essays, reviews, popular articles and schoolbooks. Besides scientific publications,Ihanus has written three books of poetry (one of them in English called On the Road to Narva the Kabbalist, 2013), two books of aphorisms (the other in English, called On the Edge, 2015), a book of short prose, literary essays, critiques and separate poems published in different forums. He is also a member of the transartistic and -disciplinary Sjählö 9 group and has taken part in its exhibitions and activities.