Sunday, 03.08.2025
Miriam Simun
How to Become an Octopus (and Sometimes Squid)
Octopus Workshop
1:00 - 2:30 PM
Duration: approx. 90 minutes
Limited capacity! RSVP via bonjour@tropeztropez.de
How to Become an Octopus (and Sometimes Squid)
What might we learn by thinking, sensing, and moving like an octopus? In this embodied, experimental workshop, artist Miriam Simun invites participants to leave behind the habits of upright human life and explore the world from the perspective of the soft-bodied, many-armed cephalopod. How to Become an Octopus (and Sometimes Squid) is a guided session in collective transformation, adaptation, and sensory experimentation - a practical tutorial in otherness, camouflage, and survival beyond the human. The octopus is a master of transformation: soft, distributed, fluid, and attuned to the world through touch, taste, and changeable skin. In this workshop, participants will move through a series of exercises designed to cultivate octopus perception and movement, attuning to new forms of relation and connection. Expect sensory play, movement explorations, and moments of gentle discomfort as we probe the boundaries between self and environment, visibility and withdrawal, surface and depth.
The workshop will take place outdoors and in water, and includes immersive sound and guided activities – sometimes with eyes closed or blindfolded – to heighten bodily awareness and encourage new ways of sensing, adapting, and being together. All bodies are welcome; no previous experience necessary. How to Become an Octopus is an experiment in collective adaptation, in letting go of clarity and mastery, and in inhabiting uncertainty – not as a problem to be solved, but as a site of possibility.
We will work alone, in partners, and as a group – on land and in the water. There will be an invitation to come into touch with yourself, your environment, and the others around you. Please wear clothes you feel comfortable moving and swimming in, and goggles are recommended.
About the artist
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent and humor to create art works in various formats, for example – video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. Recurring questions revolve around interspecies relations and non-human intelligence; the relationship of technological innovation to mythology and desire; the construction of knowledge and the violence of categories; and radical reimaginings of life under ecological crisis.
Trained as a sociologist, Simun takes on the role of ‘artist-as-fieldworker,’ conducting first-person research with diverse places and communities: from scientific laboratories to rewilded forests, from freedivers to human pollinators. This in-depth and corporeal research dictates the form of the final artworks.
Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including the New Museum (NYC, 2024), Gropius Bau (Berlin, 2020), Momenta Biennale (Montreal, 2021), New Museum (New York, 2017), Himalayas Museum (Shanghai, 2017), MIT List Center for Visual Art (Cambridge, 2022) and the Bogota Museum of Modern Art (Colombia, 2019). Simun is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Creative Capital Foundation grant, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant, Onassis Foundation fellowship, and Gulbenkian Foundation International Artist grant, among others. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, Forbes, Flash Art International, Art21 and ARTNews, Simun's works are included in private collections and in the public collection of FRAC-Bretagne.
Simun holds degrees from the MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction group), NYU's ITP Program, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently an artist-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a fellow at Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio.
Sunday, 03.08.2025
Miriam Simun
How to Become an Octopus (and Sometimes Squid)
Octopus Workshop
1:00 - 2:30 PM
Duration: approx. 90 minutes
Limited capacity! RSVP via bonjour@tropeztropez.de
How to Become an Octopus (and Sometimes Squid)
What might we learn by thinking, sensing, and moving like an octopus? In this embodied, experimental workshop, artist Miriam Simun invites participants to leave behind the habits of upright human life and explore the world from the perspective of the soft-bodied, many-armed cephalopod. How to Become an Octopus (and Sometimes Squid) is a guided session in collective transformation, adaptation, and sensory experimentation - a practical tutorial in otherness, camouflage, and survival beyond the human. The octopus is a master of transformation: soft, distributed, fluid, and attuned to the world through touch, taste, and changeable skin. In this workshop, participants will move through a series of exercises designed to cultivate octopus perception and movement, attuning to new forms of relation and connection. Expect sensory play, movement explorations, and moments of gentle discomfort as we probe the boundaries between self and environment, visibility and withdrawal, surface and depth.
The workshop will take place outdoors and in water, and includes immersive sound and guided activities – sometimes with eyes closed or blindfolded – to heighten bodily awareness and encourage new ways of sensing, adapting, and being together. All bodies are welcome; no previous experience necessary. How to Become an Octopus is an experiment in collective adaptation, in letting go of clarity and mastery, and in inhabiting uncertainty – not as a problem to be solved, but as a site of possibility.
We will work alone, in partners, and as a group – on land and in the water. There will be an invitation to come into touch with yourself, your environment, and the others around you. Please wear clothes you feel comfortable moving and swimming in, and goggles are recommended.
About the artist
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent and humor to create art works in various formats, for example – video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. Recurring questions revolve around interspecies relations and non-human intelligence; the relationship of technological innovation to mythology and desire; the construction of knowledge and the violence of categories; and radical reimaginings of life under ecological crisis.
Trained as a sociologist, Simun takes on the role of ‘artist-as-fieldworker,’ conducting first-person research with diverse places and communities: from scientific laboratories to rewilded forests, from freedivers to human pollinators. This in-depth and corporeal research dictates the form of the final artworks.
Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including the New Museum (NYC, 2024), Gropius Bau (Berlin, 2020), Momenta Biennale (Montreal, 2021), New Museum (New York, 2017), Himalayas Museum (Shanghai, 2017), MIT List Center for Visual Art (Cambridge, 2022) and the Bogota Museum of Modern Art (Colombia, 2019). Simun is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Creative Capital Foundation grant, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant, Onassis Foundation fellowship, and Gulbenkian Foundation International Artist grant, among others. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, Forbes, Flash Art International, Art21 and ARTNews, Simun's works are included in private collections and in the public collection of FRAC-Bretagne.
Simun holds degrees from the MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction group), NYU's ITP Program, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently an artist-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a fellow at Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio.
TROPEZ
at Sommerbad Humboldthain
Wiesenstraße 1, 13357 Berlin
Google Maps
Monday – Sunday
10.00 am – 6.00 pm
TROPEZ
at Sommerbad Humboldthain
Wiesenstraße 1, 13357 Berlin
Google Maps
Monday – Sunday
10.00 am – 6.00 pm
