VitaContemplativa

Vita Contemplativa is a participatory art project focused on agency — the capacity to perceive oneself as an agent of one’s own actions and decisions. It emerged from a personal experience of burnout and a crisis of meaning, also connected to several years of activist work addressing political violence, war, and solidarity. This experience intersects with a broader condition of the present, in which individuals are exposed to processes that profoundly affect their lives while remaining largely beyond their control. The project therefore does not ask how such control might be gained, but rather how we distinguish between what we cannot influence, what we can influence, and what we merely perceive as impossible.

The title Vita Contemplativa draws on Byung-Chul Han’s reflections on the contemplative life and his critique of the achievement society, in which the freedom of “I can” easily turns into the pressure to constantly be able to do more. Central to the project is the shift from “I cannot be able” to “I am able not to be able”: the same limit can be experienced as failure, but also as the possibility of not to act, of refusing the demand for constant performance, or of acknowledging one’s own limitations. Vita Contemplativa begins with the hypothesis that our sense of agency is shaped not only by the range of our possibilities, but also by the perspective from which we interpret them.

The project’s main tool is a dramaturgy of questions inspired by the Socratic elenchus — a method that uses questions to examine beliefs, their underlying assumptions, and possible contradictions. Participants respond only yes or no. Shifts in context, ambiguity, humour, and absurdity redirect attention away from the answers themselves and towards self-observation — towards one’s own processes of doubt and decision-making. Moving through the questions thus becomes an inner performance, in which a person is simultaneously actor and spectator, while different positions of the self may enter into dialogue with one another. The answers gradually form a graphic score, which can then be interpreted through rhythm and repetition — through movement, breath, sound, or work with material. This interpretation changes the pace following an intense period of self-reflection and allows the experience to resonate without requiring it to be immediately explained or brought to closure.

The project’s research basis brings together several perspectives on the relationship between freedom, decision-making, and the conditions that shape our actions. Zigmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity describes an environment in which stable social structures and identities lose their self-evidence; Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice challenges the assumption that more options automatically mean more freedom; Robert Sapolski’s determinism radicalises the question of whether we can regard our decisions as autonomous at all. Albert Camus’s concept of the absurd, meanwhile, opens up the possibility of acting without definitive certainty or ultimate meaning.

The idea that a person is not necessarily a completely unified being is also important to the project’s inner dramaturgy. Karen Horney describes inner conflicts between different ways of relating to the world, while Jeff Hawkins’ Thousand Brains theory proposes multiple parallel models and reference frames (internal coordinate systems for structuring knowledge) through which the brain interprets the same reality. The project does not combine these theories into a single psychological model, but draws on a potential they share: a shift in reference frame can change the meaning of a situation without the situation itself changing.

Vita Contemplativa therefore does not promise that every participant will arrive at a new perspective or a stronger sense of agency. It creates conditions in which a habitual way of thinking can briefly become visible, be interrupted and rearranged. Contemplation here is not the opposite of action; it becomes a possibility to change the position from which we act.