May 2025
This workshop proposes a sustained, critical engagement with Physarum polycephalum – a non-neural, decentralized organism that resists classification and yet continues to capture the speculative imagination across disciplines. Neither metaphor nor specimen, the blob is approached here as a material operator: a being whose presence unsettles, whose behavior invites thought, and whose slimy form exposes the limits of anthropocentric knowledge systems.
The condition of being slimy – viscous, ungraspable – has long carried moral, aesthetic, and political weight. In philosophy and cultural discourse, slime appears at the threshold between form and body, self and other, pure and impure. It disturbs categorical clarity and often signals the presence of something transgressive, toxic, or threatening. Slime, in this sense, is not merely a substance but a semiotic crisis, a material affect that binds disgust and attraction in the same gesture.
This workshop invites participants to engage with the blob through modes of witnessing, proximity, and discomfort, rather than control or explanation. We will work through the affective entanglements that slime provokes – revulsion, fascination, care, unease – foregrounding how these responses are shaped by cultural codes, power structures, and epistemological habits.
Drawing from new materialism, feminist theory, relational ontology, we will consider what it means to learn in the presence of an organism that eludes mastery. What does it mean to be ethically implicated by something that cannot be fully known or possessed? How might discomfort become the generative ground for reflection and change? In an era marked by ecological precarity and systemic breakdown, we explore the possibility that it is not hope or certainty, but shared fear and unease, that opens space for collective transformation.
Virág Szálas-Motesiczky (b. 1990, former Czechoslovakia) is an artist-researcher whose work interrogates the material and symbolic residues of post-socialist transition. Her practice investigates how notions of collectivity, transgenerational customs, and geopolitical traces co-produce social imaginaries, asking why historical legacies continue to delimit prospective futures. Combining archival excavation with situated fieldwork, she frames objects and sites as epistemic actors that reveal entanglements among governance, memory, and material agency.
Educated at Design Academy Eindhoven (foundation) and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (BFA), she co-founded a speculative studio dedicated to collaborative modes of inquiry, located in a converted Protestant church in the Netherlands. In September 2025, she will enter the Master Education in Arts program at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where she turns to pedagogy as a critical technology for collective problem-solving and the creation of equitable space. By embedding artistic research within participatory learning environments, she aims to cultivate transdisciplinary publics capable of re-imagining socio-ecological relations beyond anthropocentric paradigms through group dynamics and collective narratives.
