SOFT TISSUE – Free Workshop Series

SOFT TISSUE is a series of workshops by SOUPSPOON Collective that approaches health not as a fixed condition to be diagnosed or restored, but as a set of shifting relations with what the body encounters, whether memory, environment, or its own psycho-social and political conditions.

The series asks how embodied practices can unsettle the politics of diagnosis and treatment while opening other ways of sensing and being together. In The Embryonic Desire, sound and hypnosis guide participants toward memories lodged in the body, surfacing what has been forgotten yet continues to shape lived experience. Performing (Pre-)Scription treats the prescription as a score, a pre-written document that awaits its performer, to examine how authority is distributed and how agency can be rehearsed. The concluding workshop, which gives the whole series its name, Soft Tissue reimagines massage as a live dialogue of pressure and response, where touch becomes a medium of mutual care and collective inquiry.

This workshop series is intended towards individuals who are actively seeking to delve into practices of embodied knowledge, collective care, and grassroots forms of resistance.

ADMISSION IS FREE. SIGN UP VIA THIS LINK.

Workshop 1: The Embryonic Desire
This desire to return, not as nostalgia but as an exploration of memory, frames the conceptual framework of The Embryonic Desire: a way to uncover memories embedded in our bodies, those forgotten yet continue to secretly shape our reality. These fragmented memories carry crucial information about ourselves, the politics of our identity, and the social conditions of their time. This listening session and workshop explores how sound and hypnosis can reconfigure bodily perception and access memories embedded in our body. This approach invites individuals to revisit embodied images, experiencing them through bodily sensations and felt emotions. Together, we will listen through the body, opening a shared space to drift between conscious and (sub)conscious states, and to collectively sense what listening can activate: personally, politically, and somatically.
Date & Time 9 Nov ~ 15.00 – 18.00
Space WORM UBIK
What to bring: Nothing

Workshop 2: Performing (Pre-)Scription
Performing (Pre-)Scription explores the prescription as a performative document — a writing in advance, a record of an event before it has taken place. Like a score or script, it anticipates embodiment. In this workshop, participants write prescriptions without diagnosis — or, perhaps, prescriptions that await a symptom. Hung on a line, these texts circulate anonymously until someone feels drawn to take one. Performed for the group, each prescription becomes an embodied interpretation: the body rewriting the pre-written, and asking how agency might be rehearsed within and beyond the structures that speak of (un)health.
Date & Time 16 Nov ~ 15.00 – 18.00
Space WORM S/ash gallery
What to bring: Nothing

Workshop 3: Soft Tissue
In this immersive workshop, massage is reframed as a live, relational form, that generate subtle pressures, stretches, and responsive gestures, turning touch into a dynamic visual‑kinesthetic score. Working in pairs or small clusters, this hands-on session invites participants to explore how touch can serve as quiet communication, mutual care, and embodied self-inquiry. The session connects this practice to wider histories of bodywork, highlighting how diverse cultures have long relied on the human hand to soothe, repair, and bring people closer. In this space, participants are invited to carry that legacy forward, reimagining massage as an everyday gesture of self-care, an antidote to isolation, and a reminder that soft tissues hold not only stress, but also the possibility of solidarity.
Date & Time: 23 Nov ~ 15.00 – 18.00
Space WORM UBIK
What to bring: comfortable clothing, without sharp accessories

SOUPSPOON Collective is a Rotterdam-based group of artists and cultural workers committed to cultivating a shared, Asian-contextualized space for particularities that elude translation. Formed in 2022, we foster a generative forum for “minor gestures” and “micro-politics,” working across workshops, performance, sound, text, and embodied research. We are brought together by a shared interest in somatic knowledge, translocal solidarity, and speculative approaches to how bodies hold experience, memory, and everyday politics. We design formats that are intimate, process-led, and often site-responsive, shifting between art, (un)learning, and social encounter to unsettle dominant ideas of temporality, identity, and relationality.

We have collaborated with local platforms including TENT, Reading Room Rotterdam, Roodkapje, Rib, Goethe-Institut, and Non Native Native, engaging audiences across art, activism, and grassroots networks.

SOFT TISSUE is part of WORM x Amarte 2025 collaboration in the context of which four collectives were invited to create a new workshop series. learn more here.