In 2022, I established the (roaming) Center for Urban Esotericá (CUE) to offer hybrid art workshop-tours of esoterically-coded architecture, statues, and urban infrastructure.

Esoteric in nature, the symbols soaking the urban require a combined approach of thinking & feeling/dreaming & doing to comprehend. They are both universal in their themes and profoundly personal. They push the limits of a perceived “multiculturalism”, to an inter-culturalism. The emergent themes have been circling, swirling, and morphing around the globe for thousands of years. Everyone can claim them; they belong to us all.

Indeed, the intercultural language of esotericá takes on varied expressions, their details change, the characters morph in texture and form. And yet, it is precisely because of this variety that it becomes possible to discern a vast, open-ended undercurrent to the human condition. When personally, holistically, engaged with, these stories have a chance to evolve with us, bringing more awareness and stimulating more empathy in the choices we make, the paths we follow, and those that we light for others.

Working from my personal artistic research with esoteric material culture that began formally in 2019 in Amsterdam, these workshop-tours aim at democratizing meaningful encounters with the city, and re/imagine it as a partner for cultivating self-knowledge - available to all.

What you will gain as a workshop-tour participant:

• Visual literacy of esoteric material culture and its symbols;

• Methods to meaningfully dialogue with the universal themes they evoke;

• Support as you discover your own voice with and through these themes through intuitive artistic processes.

As the basis of these tours, I combine artistic and intellectual processes strategically: Engagement with these aspects of consciousness is needed to penetrate the esoteric meaning the material culture invites, and come to personal, inspired knowing.

Facilitating personal dialogues with esoteric material culture is a global project, beginning with offerings in New York, NY and Amsterdam, NL. This means that while the subject matter may differ according to the context, the underlying structure remains the same.

I guide you first with on-site felt and intellectual stimulation, and then into intuitive, process-oriented techniques in order to speak, learn, and relate to the self, the monument, and the city as microcosm. Though neither the intellectual nor the intuitive is entirely discrete, attending to each with care resists the temptation to foreclose your own progress.

*while each workshop-tour can stand alone, it is possible to continue the guided intuitive artistic methods with me on a one-on-one basis.

#embodied encounters

#Intuitive art-making