Björn Säfsten © Joakim Nystrom
In this workshop you will get to experience the main practice used in Säfstens two latest productions and so we’re gone (2023) and Haunted desires (2025). The practice is a conjunction of methods that plays with transformations of filmed materials taken from social media. The practice focuses on re-writing, smirching and de-constructing movements and bodies that we encounter on daily basis through scrolling on our phones.
By reproducing and re-write our own algorithms the practice offers a way to give agency to the viewer themselves and to imagine through physical experimentation other possible outcomes and associations. The practice focuses on editing set-materials through a series of tools that in the end of the three days will offer a multi-layered, highly disciplined and playful mode of improvisation.
For the workshop you need to bring your phone, or most used portable screen with an active SoMe account with access to reels, for example Instagram, TikTok or similar.
Björn Säfsten (Sweden)
Björn Säfsten is a dancer, choreographer and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. For over 25 years, Björn has created numerous works for larger and smaller stages and commissions at various Nordic companies. His ongoing curatorial practice is manifested through the bi-annual festival Within Practice in Stockholm, founded in 2018. His choreographic work centers around the notion of the body and movements as a canvas constantly being interpreted by the viewer. The aim is to challenge, sharpen, and create awareness of how interpretation functions. In a distinctive, specific, transformative, and equilibristic language of movement, the performers use gesture in ambiguous and transformative manners, giving the audience multiple potential references. Language to Säfsten is never constant or functional in the manner one often perceives, and the works aim to play with these notions in new manners for each piece.