Examples
Seminars & Workshops
3-day seminar
Studium Fundamentale
Brandenburg Medical School
2023–2026, once per summer/winter semester
In Hinduism, it is believed that all living things pulse. A good example is the heartbeat, which constantly changes in response to internal and external factors. These changes, in turn, affect our state of being and our dynamic relationship with the world around us.
The creation of such dynamic tensions is also at the core of rhythm in music. Through rhythm, we can be brought into distinct physical and emotional states. We recognize this when we hear a piece of music whose “groove” carries us along for reasons we often cannot—and do not wish to—fully explain. Goosebumps, the urge to move—there is something almost magical about it. A groove “you can’t help but move to” is an especially intense form of rhythmic play, unfolding at a specific pulse. Its intensity arises through repetition and a particular sense of timing. When we not only allow ourselves to be carried by it emotionally but also approach it analytically, we begin to understand: rhythm is mathematics, and at the same time a delicate sequencing of complex temporal processes—processes we encounter in many other fields, especially in medical teamwork contexts.
So what does it really mean to be “at the pulse of time”? Or ahead of it—or behind it? At its core, this is about the phenomenon of time: how we experience it and what we do with it, individually and collectively.
This seminar takes precisely this as its starting point: through an intensive practical weekend, students—guided by a rhythm expert, master percussionist, and university lecturer—are invited to immerse themselves in the many facets of rhythm, both in practice and in reflection.
The course is also suitable for those who are convinced that they are not, or only minimally, musical.
3-day seminar
Studium Fundamentale
Brandenburg Medical School
2019–2023, once per summer/winter semester
“In the beginning was play,” says the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga.
In his classic Homo Ludens (man as player), he sketches—somewhat tongue-in-cheek—a countermodel to the anthropological idea of Homo Faber (man as maker). Homo Ludens “plays” continuously, accompanied by a sense of tension, serious joy, and the awareness of temporarily stepping outside everyday life.
Play has rules to which players voluntarily submit. The ambitious learn to stretch these rules; cheaters manipulate them—an act that, once exposed, typically leads to outrage and exclusion from the game. Within play, participants form an ad hoc community that emerges from anonymous multiplicity and, within a space set apart from reality, pursues its own activity with great seriousness—ideally evolving into a kind of organism of its own.
This seminar takes precisely this as its point of departure:
Through a selection of collectively realized play situations—based on specific ways of organizing shared action in space—it seeks to initiate scenarios that allow for the exploration and experience of group dynamics and individual agency in unusual ways, and to move beyond one’s own limits.
Forms and principles of interaction that also play a role in everyday medical practice reveal themselves here from a different perspective.
Following all the rules of the art, the seminar will experiment across disciplines—from music to theatre to performance art—testing, analyzing, and discussing different models in changing constellations, discovering new approaches while re-encountering the familiar in unexpected ways.
2-day workshop
MHB Summer School on the topic “The End of Life as Part of Life”, August 2023
In a remote region of Romania lies the village of Săpânţa. There you find the Cimitirul Vesel, the “Merry Cemetery.” Around 40 years ago, the local community adopted an unusual approach to commemorating the dead: they commissioned a local woodcarver to create wooden crosses for each newly deceased member of the village. These crosses feature colorful imagery, intricate ornamentation, and short folkloric verses that recount the lives of the deceased in a distinctly humorous—sometimes even bluntly ironic—manner.
This site is unique in Europe, yet it reflects a broader practice found in many cultures: forms of remembrance that incorporate a particular kind of humor, situated somewhere between subtle cheerfulness and tender melancholy. This raises the question of what kind of resonance such a practice of mourning creates—for the bereaved as well as for us observing from a distance.
To explore this, the first day of the workshop will be dedicated to a remote investigation of the cemetery. We will then look at other unusual practices of remembrance from different cultural contexts and discuss them together.
On the second day, the focus will shift to practical artistic work, culminating in a collective piece: we will approach the model of the “Merry Cemetery” by designing our own version of such a commemorative site for Neuruppin and installing it for one day at a selected location in the immediate vicinity of the Summer School.
The workshop is open to anyone interested in the intersection of a sensitive and respectful approach to remembrance with the possibility of a reflective, imaginative, and humor-infused artistic practice.
1-day workshop
MHB Summer School on the topic “The Beginning of Life”
August 2025
A “welcome music” for mothers and their newborns
In this workshop, participants will learn how AI-based tools can be used to create music and song lyrics that can play a role in the period shortly after birth—without requiring any prior musical training.
Working in small groups, participants will experiment with ways of producing individualized “welcome songs” for mother and child. To do so, we will engage with imagined persons and situations in the context of birth, generating the material for each composition during the workshop and ultimately bringing everything together through AI into a collection of “birth songs.” After the production phase, the works will be shared and discussed collectively.
The workshop brings together artistic, medical, and psychological practices within the highly sensitive context of childbirth. Music serves not only as a gesture of care, but also as a means of emotional reflection—and even processing—of an intense life moment for everyone involved.
Requirements: a well-functioning laptop with updated browsers and headphones to be brought to the workshop; prior experience with AI tools is helpful but not required.
Alternative Playing Attitudes in Performance and Improvisation
Y Institute, Bern University of the Arts
5-day workshop
5 editions, 2011–2016
Directed by: Maurice de Martin (composer and performer, Berlin)
“Art is a crucial, dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art.” — Morton Feldman
This toolbox presents, through a kaleidoscope of artistic practices beyond the mainstream, ways of developing a style-independent approach to performance—through an individualized craft combined with a disciplined playfulness of thinking and a reflective willingness to take risks in action.
Prominent as well as lesser-known examples from outsider art, the margins of improvisational practice, underground folklore, Fluxus art, trash performance, as well as concepts from experimental jazz, rock, and pop up to noise art, will be explored and directly translated into tangible and audible results within the group.
Participants are thus equipped with a range of “tools” that open up alternative ways of engaging with their own abilities, enabling a free movement between disciplines.
The workshop is explicitly open not only to musicians but also to participants from all other disciplines.
Y Institute, Bern University of the Arts
5-day workshop
Spring Semester 2013
Directed by: Maurice de Martin
The course explores the relationship between art and everyday life—and seeks to investigate the possibilities of a conscious encounter between these two “realities.” At the center of our work is an artistic research process in public space, focusing on encounters between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Over the course of five days, we will immerse ourselves in the perceived everyday space of our surroundings, searching for the hidden characteristics of specific places, living beings, and objects. Through artistic methods of observation, interpretation, and intervention, we will collectively explore how “reality” can serve as a source of inspiration for artistic work.
The course is open to all HKB disciplines. The only requirements are a willingness to engage in dialogue, curiosity, and openness to the unexpected. Sturdy footwear is also recommended.
