Connecting to our Rage as The Eternal Fire Within: Stewarding our Responses and Responsibility to the World

PUBLIC WORKSHOP | 6 April 2025 | 13.00-16.30 | Studio, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam

In the workshop "Connecting to our Rage as The Eternal Fire Within: Stewarding our Responses and Responsibility to the World” artist Raoni Muzho Saleh invites participants to explore rage as a vital, transformative force—a fire that ignites in response to injustice, whether personal or systemic. We will delve into the idea that expressing rage is necessary for transformation, towards reconnecting with our sense of justice, both individually and collectively.

Through embodied practices, meditative exercises, and collective reflection, we will:

Connect and channel the energy of rage and fury within our bodies.

Examine the societal and political dimensions of rage: Which bodies are allowed to express anger publicly, and which are deemed "too dangerous”? What happens to the body when we experience injustice and are policed in our outrage?

Reclaim the fire of rage as a source of clarity and purpose, guiding us toward the world we want to fight for.

The element of fire serves as our central metaphor—rage as a force that can destroy, transform, and illuminate. In a culture that often fears conflict and celebrates passive aggression as being “direct”, this workshop creates a brave space to engage directly with what feels conflictual and unresolved. We will use voice exercises, movement, and meditative practices to move the energy of rage through our bodies, fostering a deeper connection to our inner fire, the same fire that is connected to the fire within the earth’s body. Together, we will reflect the expression of rage as a political tool and harnessed as a tool for collective liberation.

This workshop is for anyone seeking to explore the transformative potential of rage and grief, to better understand their relationship to these states of being, and to channel them into beautiful world-making. 

Photo credit: Tengbeh Kamara, 6 April 2024 "Communal Embodied Practices" workshop Wereldmuseum Amsterdam

This workshop is the first of two which starts off our new workshop series “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock” co-organised with our friend and collaborator, Raoni Muzho Saleh. Please find more on the series below. The first two workshops center on the radical power of Rage & Grief and will take place on Sunday April 6 and Sunday April 13 at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. We encourage you to attend both as these workshops will build on each other, but attending one of them is also possible.

Accessibility

The workshop will be held in Studio on the first floor of the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam building and can be reached by elevator and stairs. The venue is equipped with gender neutral toilets. The conversations will be held in English. A note from Raoni about the accessibility of the workshop:

“This workshop is accessible to wheelchair users and people with limited movement range. It is not a requirement to have had any prior movement or voice training for this workshop. Most important is your commitment to the play and allowing yourself to touch uncomfortable places within the self and the social space.”

About the workshop series “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." 

Embodied solidarity as resistance. This is at the center of our new workshop series titled “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." We organize this community collaboration with friend and artist Raoni Muzho Saleh. Raoni chose this quote by artist and writer, Martin Prechtel as the title of the series to signal what is at the core of it; “feeling your emotions by being rocked by them instead of dispossessing yourself from your human experience by way of fixing your emotional turmoil”. This series centered on movement, play, mourning, wailing, singing and dancing and more invite participants to do just that. It will feature workshops by Raoni as well as artists he invited; A.E.Z. Pinay, Anllel Tanus and Laima Jaunzema. More information on their contributions will follow.

 This program is inspired by the conversations we had with our collaborators in 2024 - Rethinking Wellness and Communal Embodied Practices specifically– in which we looked at ways to decenter thinking and working with the body from the notion of individualistic self-actualization. Instead we put the focus on imagining communal embodied practices as a necessity for our individual and collective awareness of the political and social climate around us, making it possible to build community and affect change collectively. This year we build on these moments of collective reimagining with the interactive workshop program “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." It is one of the community collaboration projects we do at Research Center for Material Culture that are an evolving practice of creating space for the creative agency for members of historically marginalized communities in the museum.

About Raoni Muzho Saleh

Raoni/Muzho Saleh is a Hazara Afghan artist using performance, installation and the sound of mourning moaning to twist and reshape narratives of (cultural) becoming. His work's focus is to play with fugitivity, by not settling on a rigid form. Applying movement and sound as a Raoni Muzho Saleh transformational kind of poetry, he searches for how to continuously be something else, something strange. His practice is engaged with the entanglement of body, spirit, politics and love within art. Through the use of materials such as movement, voice, text and textile he makes works that temporarily immerse both audience and performers in otherworldly thinking, feeling and relating.