trails and spells of water
A 5-week online course sending you along different meanders, confluences and estuaries to create a story in which your chosen body of water becomes the main character. We will guide you through the tangled trails, hidden portals, and the visible and invisible waterways around and within you. Through a series of exercises that involve both your body and imagination we will lead you through the process of developing a larger body of text emerging from interactions with your liquid character. Each of the sessions encourages diverse artistic expressions – with the emphasis on creative writing and storytelling. The course will offer a space for the embodiment of images and ideas, collective reflection and involvement of your creative expression. We invite you to follow the trails and spells of water, allow yourself to get lost in the liquid imagery and temporalities, and find new, unexpected springs of ideas.
The course will take place online from November 9th to December 7th 2026, with sessions happening weekly on Mondays from 17:00 CET to 19:30 CET.
It is co-facilitated by Kai Feldhammer, Joanna Gruntkowska & Małgorzata Suś.
Scroll down for an overview of the course program, info on the facilitators and our pricing model.
course program:
Monday, October 26th 2026, 17:00 – 19:30 CET
Liquid Characters led by Kai Feldhammer, Joanna Gruntkowska & Małgorzata Suś
Water bodies in our surroundings are more than just containers of the most vital substance on the planet – they are also homes, companions, therapists, storages of emotions and memories, and characters – entities that have a voice and a lot to talk about. In the introduction of the course we would like to invite you to bring your chosen water body – one that you know well from your surroundings, one that vividly lives in your memory, or even an imaginary one – and let it become a character of the story which you’ll be writing throughout the following 5 weeks. During the session, we will introduce our liquid characters and go through a series of exercises allowing us to reflect on the nature of our connection with the chosen water bodies, and capture the first intuitions about the direction of our stories.
Monday, November 2nd 2026, 17:00 – 19:30 CET
Speculative Topographies – Following Unstable Lines of Water led by Małgorzata Suś
In this session we will focus on mapping and tracing shapes, forms and patterns depicting your chosen water body. Taking on a nearly scientific perspective, we will begin from gathering the geographical and geophysical data related to your liquid character. We will try to draw its shape, trace its pathways, follow its porous boundaries and track the changeable corridors, floors and shores. “Coasts [just as river banks and any other liminal water areas] are not lines, but dynamic zones of interaction between geophysical, the meteorological, vegetable, animal and human bodies of water”(1) – how can we translate this dynamism and constant motion and entanglements into visual and textual representation? Using our bodies as mediators, we will search for alternative ways for depicting the complex and mutable nature of water.
(1) Jenna Sutela, Oceanic Feeling, in: The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish.
Monday, November 9th 2026, 17:00 – 19:30 CET
Inter/mediated waters led by Joanna Gruntkowska
In this session we will search for echoes of our chosen bodies of water within the fluids of our own bodies. Through somatic and imaginative practices, we will listen to the words and images that might be hiding in the containers for our currents and tides. What different liquids might they tell us about the places we are trying to encounter? What unexpected similarities and relations might emerge when we listen through interoception? We will look closely at the points where fluids within us meet the landscapes we have chosen, approaching these encounters as ecotones where life and language can flourish. We will consider how our relationships with aquatic environments are mediated through our own bodies, asking what are we contaminated by and what forms of relation might this contamination make possible?
Monday, November 16th 2026, 17:00 – 19:30 CET
Portals and oracles led by Kai Feldhammer
This session is your guide to getting lost. We will try out various approaches of tending to a nourishing ground for chance encounters and the magic of place as an oracle.
Instead of engaging with divination practices mainly in order to think about possible futures or gain insight, can we work with oracles as tools for a storytelling that spans various temporalities and perspectives? Tools that ask us to surrender and that open up a curious way of interacting with our fluvial, oceanic or other watery collaborators.
These kinds of oracles are not meant to provide certainty or answers. They are unruly, autonomous beings. They include the rupture, the mess and the unsettling as much as hoping and dreaming. We will guide each other and are guided by our chosen water bodies. Together we will move through portals – organic and inorganic – speculate on the many directions they might lead us and discover different kinds of vocabularies along the way.
Monday, November 23rd 2026, 17:00 – 19:30 CET
(Water) Bodies in Conversation led by Kai Feldhammer, Joanna Gruntkowska & Małgorzata Suś
In the closing session we will depart collectively for an imaginary tour visiting all water bodies that have been the characters of our stories. The participants will have a chance to introduce their liquid landscapes to the others, and guide a short interaction through which we’ll be able to get to know the water bodies better and take a walk on the shore, dive in, or even find ourselves lost in the underwater currents. Along the journey, we will build a miniature atlas of the trails and spells of water, a secret gateway to shared landscapes across the continents and personal imaginations.
meet the facilitators:
Małgorzata Suś (b. 1991, Poland) is a Portugal-based dancer, performer and choreographer working cross-disciplinarily with visual arts, poetry and science. Her practice is dedicated to researching the connection between body, movement and nature, taking inspiration primarily from water environments. Nourished by ideas of hydrofeminism and environmental humanities, her works are oriented towards bringing attention and care to other-than-human beings. Co-creator of The Memory of Water project and co-founder of Watering Words collective. She’s been working as a performer with a variety of landscapes, frequently exposed to harsh weather conditions. In 2025/26 Małgorzata has been an artist-in-residence of the S+T+ARTS Aqua Motion program, developing the project “Acts of Belonging”, co-created with the local community of Esposende in Portugal.
https://malgosiasus.com/, @movementimage.
Kai Feldhammer (b. 1991, Austria) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vienna. Their practice moves somewhere between mask- and printmaking, performance and experimental film.
Kai’s projects interweave the tangible with the speculative and seek out various ways of (re)telling stories that center nonhuman perspectives. They are largely based on folklore, embodied knowledge and oral storytelling traditions.
Kai frequently collaborates with people from all different fields of practice or knowledge, in order to create tactile worlds that highlight and foster curiosity and a sensual connection to the environment. She frequently facilitates workshops or skillsharing sessions on alternative printmaking processes, creative writing or the basics of mask- and puppet-making.
Joanna Gruntkowska (b. 1991, Poland) is a dancer and choreographer whose practice brings together contemporary dance, experimental choreography, somatic methods and experience in physical theatre. She works at the intersection of ecosomatics, dance improvisation and environmental humanities, and is currently in the process of Body–Mind Centering® certification. Her work approaches embodied research as a way of sensing, imagining and reconfiguring relationships between human and more-than-human bodies. She is a co-creator of the Watering Words collective and of the duo Liquid Forms, where she explores the performative potential of Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, weaving it through somatic practices and embryology. She is interested in translating scientific phenomena into bodily experience and in developing improvisational and compositional tools that allow performers and participants to connect with the materiality and intelligence of their surroundings. Her projects often take the form of open workshops, emphasizing collective knowledge-making, care and community-building through artistic practice. Besides, she still dances.
ticket & pricing info:
Pricing:
We are working with a sliding scale payment model. What you pay is based on your relative financial standing:
Supporter Tickets are for those who have some expendable financial resources and would like to help fund a subsidised ticket.
General Admission represents the true cost of a course place.
Subsidised Tickets are for those who cannot afford the price of a General Admission ticket, and also for our regular Encounters participants.
Supporter: 120€
General Admission: 100€
Subsidised + regular participants: 80€
If the course really speaks to you but money is an issue – please do not hesitate to reach out to us. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Refund & Cancellation Policy
Ticket refunds can be made up to 7 days before the start of the course. After this, no refunds or cancellations will be made. If you have questions or concerns about this, please contact [email protected] before booking.
We reserve the right to cancel the course if we do not meet a minimum number of registrants. In this instance, all tickets will be fully refunded, minus payment processing fees.
frequently asked questions:
Who is this course for?
Anyone who is interested in creative, imaginative or somatic practices. In previous courses, people have engaged with the exercises through writing, dancing, drawing, collaging, sound-making and many other forms of creative expression.
How big is the group?
The maximum of participants for this course is 30.
Will I be expected to have my camera on or speak?
Everyone is free to engage with each session in whichever way works best for them – with or without camera; sharing thoughts and ideas verbally or in written form in the chat or in an email afterwards, or not at all.
Do I need to share what I have created for each session?
There will be designated time slots in each session for a collective discussion or the possibility of presenting, for those who would like to share something with the group. But nobody is ever put on the spot or required to share or show anything.
Am I expected to write my texts in English?
While the course will be held in English, for any text that you choose to write you can use whichever language feels most comfortable, familiar or interesting to you.
Will I be expected to do ‘homework’?
Although reading material and prompts or invitations to write/ create will be offered for each session, it is never a requirement to follow them or have anything prepared. You are free to engage with these materials when and in any way you want.
What if I cannot make it to every single session?
No worries! A recording of each session will be provided to all participants after each meeting.
Any further questions or doubts? Email us at [email protected]
bibliography & references:
- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
- Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire, Terra Forma. A Book of Speculative Maps
- Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science
- Annie Dillon, Teaching a Stone to Talk
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene
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Robert Macfarlane, Underland
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Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive?
- mapped.earth https://mapped.earth/
- Jenny Oddell, Saving Time. Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
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Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and Kostas Stasinopoulos, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish
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Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
- Rebecca Solnit, A Fieldguide to Getting Lost
- Stephanie Springgay, Sarah E. Truman, Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World
- Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Counter Mapping https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/counter-mapping/
- Isabelle Stengers, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science