the LYCEUM
embodied knowledge
creative practice
emergent business
Let’s begin with an axiom:
ARTISTS WIELD CREATIVE POWER.
Creative power is not like the power we see at work around us: the power that is rooted in control, scrutiny, shame, inflexibility, and force.
The power that is wielded over other people on pain of violence.
AND YET,
IT IS STILL POWER.
The Lyceum is a space on the outskirts of capitalism for artists to gather together & activate their creative power.
MY NAME IS
Caroline
1) you suffer from bouts of intense focus or even obsession
2) your wide-ranging curiosity borders on dilettantism
3) you bear an almost reckless disregard for your personal safety & long-term survival interests
4) you harbor a deep disrespect for any systems you encounter & a deep respect for the present & what is right in front of you
I have learned to recognize myself as an Artist, the hard way.
Through years spent in cycles of poisonous “empowerment,” believing I had to court the approval of institutions, authority figures, & power structures I did not even believe in.
Deep down I still thought strength looked like
I created the Lyceum for myself & others.
A space for myself & others to recover from years, decades, & lifetimes of disempowerment.
A task that may feel impossible.
It is, when we try to do it alone.
As a PhD student in German I learned about “Weltschmerz”: “"a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering.”
I have come to understand that this is the first initiation of the artist under capitalism:
to become inured to the presence of this unquenchable grief.
Not healing the world wound.
But becoming intimate with its low thrum.
“The artist exists because the world is not perfect.
The Lyceum is first of all a space for containment. It utilizes power of architecture: which gives the gift of being immovable. Of being neutral. Of separating, protecting, and allowing passage between.
THE STRUCTURE
The Lyceum is made up of 3 monthly events along with a weekly curriculum delivered, practiced, & discussed in a community forum on Telegram.
1) monthly events
x kundalini activation*
x workshop circle*
x office hours
*live on Zoom
2) weekly curriculum
teachings on art, influence, money, power, leadership & embodiment
3) daily community
interlocking spaces to discuss the weekly curriculum, to witness & be witnessed, to workshop & ideate, to celebrate & to grieve
A LATE CAPITALIST
MYSTERY SCHOOL
At the core of the Lyceum is the kundalini activation & integration circle.
This is the basis & ongoing practice of embodiment & witnessing that allows for the other two pieces.
These activations will be faciliated by Eva Marie Wiese, resident kundalini practitioner & co-steward of the Lyceum.
Eva Marie Wiese
Eva is a textile conservator & an herbalist and teaches yoga and facilitates circles of poetic and somatic rewilding. She loves to talk to plants, be near the sea and around weird, sensitive, feely humans. As someone who’s struggled with a sense of loneliness all her life, Eva has found that by truly dropping into our often similar, but unique physical experiences, our painful as well as our beautiful emotions and by opening up about them in spaces that are created for no other purpose than messy, unlinear healing, meaningful connections are created.
“Kundalini” is the feminine form of the Sanskrit term for “coiled up”.
It is creative life force that supports us in clearing away blockages, release stuckness and connect with source.
In the activation, we create a safe container in which our bodies can relax and the energy coiled in dormancy at the base of our spines can awaken.
Aided by music and (if desired) by scent, we come together and make a collective decision to open ourselves up to this kundalini shakti or divine feminine life force.
The movement of this magical and mysterious yet deeply grounded and earthy energy can facilitate emotional release, deep hypnotic trance states in which embodied information is received, and even the removal of physical blockages.
Every journey is different: The body may tremble or dance, the hands may form mudras (ritual gestures); the experience can be very subtle, with no outward sign of movement.
Either way, the energy is there, moving wherever it is needed.
AN ILLEGITIMATE
UNIVERSITY
Then there is the CURRICULUM.
These are provocations, stories, & frameworks to return to over & over again.
They began to come to me more and more regularly over the past five years.
I am still developing my embodiment of them & I always will be.
Speaking them aloud to you is the next step in my embodiment practice.
(Speech is an embodiment practice. It is possible to provoke yourself.)
A MULTIDIMENSIONAL
ARTS & CRAFTS
WORKSHOP
For artists it is incredibly important to have spaces to discuss our ideas, projects, & ongoing practice with a community of diverse practitioners.
This isn’t about critique, at least in the way we usually use the term. This is about talking about our work & sharing parts of it & using the reflections we get to help us recognize what is necessary & essential about it, what if anything is missing, what the next step is, what we are ready to chisel away.
Through this encounter with difference & partial recognition, the artist learns to hone what is indelible.
Plus, it’s fun & you make friends & collaborators!
A DISSEMINATED
SEMINAR
The Lyceum is a private public forum.
My inspiration for it came from the
pamphlets & philosophical circulars of revolutionary Euro-Atlantic to the Palestinian practice of mujaawarah to illicit samizdat publishing in totalitarian Eastern Bloc to cave paintings to Dionysian cults.
It is an affiliation.
A place for ideas & practices to be nourished & grow ripe, & nourish other ideas & other practices.
This doesn’t happen on social media anymore (I hear it once was different).
From my perspective, Instagram is a marketplace.
We need spaces that offer what social media once seemed to promise us. Genuine connection. Genuine learning. Genuine community.
So that we stop bringing our most vulnerable selves to the marketplace unprotected. So that we can see the apps for what they are now & relate to them accordingly.
So that we can become the artists we are meant to be.
THE LYCEUM IS For the artist WHO KNOWS
THE ONE WHO KNOWS
We would love to meet you inside<3