THE MYGDAL PROJECT

Mike Sandbothe

The idea of this project was developed at the working place of the two sculptors Marit Benthe Norheim and Claus Oerntoft at 10th of August 2006 in Mygdal. Mygdal is a little village in Vendsyssel, Northern Jutland, at the top of the continent. Corresponding with the natural energies of this unique place the intellectual centre of the Mygdal Project is John Dewey’s still underestimated book “Art as Experience” (1934). Dewey was probably the first philosopher who in the traces of Aristotle’s peripatos and Nietzsche’s thought walks made use of scientifically based techniques to improve the causal interplay between movement (kinesis), sensuality (aisthesis), and practical as well as intellectual experience (phronesis). Dewey himself learned these techniques from F. Matthias Alexander (1869-1955), the inventor of the so-called Alexander technique. It is the main goal of this technique to teach people to relate consciously to them selves not only and primarily in a mental but also and basically in a bodily way.

In the Mygdal Project artists, teachers, philosophers, media experts and cultural politicians are supposed to meet on a regular basis (probably every two or three months) to learn as a group how the Alexander technique works. Thereby a common set of non-verbal experiences could be established between the members of the group. That means that the participants of the Mygdal Project use the Alexander technique as a bodily media of communication. On the verbal level this tool could be complemented by the – as we will call it - pragmatist vocabulary. This is a way of thinking, that was developed by John Dewey in the last century and has been updated by the American philosopher Richard Rorty since a couple of years. The purpose of the pragmatist vocabulary is to reorganize the basic language of our understanding of the world and of our selves in a way that makes us more suitable to navigate through processes of transformation.

In a globalized world of cultural conflict and climate change, war, terrorism and systematically produced “bullshit” (Harry Frankfurt), holistic perspectives gain importance in almost all areas of human endeavour. The participants of the Mygdal Project will experiment with the Alexander technique in order to contribute to a sharpening of the intelligent interplay between phronesis and body awareness, reflective judgement and guided grounding. The intelligent intertwinement of these and other holistic human faculties of coping with complexity may turn out to be private as well as public survival tools to preserve democracy in an age of accelerated change; an age that is trying to find a new balance between economy and ecology, culture and nature, the growth of mankind and the limited resources of Planet Earth.