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Patterns of Ebb and Flow is a course given by Rachel Schuit and Cocky Eek as part of the Fieldacademy StrandLAB Almere. 

Students of both the Mime department of the ATD and the interfaculty ArtScience of the KABK meet each other on the beach, where together we move and build with the natural elements, exploring the relation of the body with a landscape. We stay there a whole week, eating and sleeping at our basecamp. 

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This week is an opportunity to experience working with the natural elements, while being part of the process and be challenged by their continual movement and change.
We’ll reside on the relatively young sandy strip of Almere Beach, along the IJ-Lake where we will specifically zoom in on – movements of sand –
Sand mediates in the liminal space between sea and land. It combines qualities of solid and liquid. Sand is both ancient and renewing. A simple storm across the beach clears all of yesterday’s traces, but a grain of sand may take eons to travel from rockformations to coastal sediment before ending up in your swimsuit and sandwich.
The interventions look for an immediacy of relating action to their environmental sources, which encourages diligent observation and accidental discovery. We will start working from a phenomenological approach to explore this specific landscape. We will do daily exercises to activate our listening body and to open your ‘physical presence’. Test setups and prototypes are based on hands-on means of enquiry in the field and fully exposure to the elements.

This course is a collaboration with StrandLAB Almere; a set-up as a project, initiated by the city of Almere and the province of Flevoland, to accelerate cultural activity in the area around the ‘Almeerderstrand’ or Almere Beach. Important consideration is to always work with the intrinsic values of the area and to contribute to the place as an area for excitement and renewal. Through working with artists and researchers StrandLAB relates to the bigger questions of Almere as a new town and the region on new ‘polderland’: how do you build an Almere identity? how do you extend the cultural facilities and how do we make use of water and land in a sustainable way?

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