What do we sense in the dark?  is a sensoric audio-visual installation as part of  the exhibition On Moving Ground. The multimodal piece questions the meaning of transformation in a space where Indigenous practices and a modern Western context meet. What brings people to these rituals and more importantly: what makes them stay? The work is an invitation to enter the ‘betwixt and between’, a liminal space, to rethink the positionality and its potential in today’s society. What kind of relations can be established?

This piece is an ongoing exploration which reflects on the relationship between our human body and the natural world, becoming aware of our unconsciousness and rethinking the position of rituals such as the sweat lodge in a world of constant change. This piece is based on five months of anthropological fieldwork across the Netherlands and explores how participants find meaning in this ceremony and what drives their engagement, particularly in the context of people expressing a sense of something missing in their lives, sometimes deriving from feelings of ‘not fitting in’. What do we sense in the dark delves into the transformative potential of sweat lodges, not to decode the experiences of participants but to delve beyond discursive interpretations and embrace the phenomenological aspects of the sweat lodge and ask to rethink intimacy by engaging all the senses.
 

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