Vilnius, November 2022, 2-day working meeting between Masha Godovannaya and collaborator Anna Lok

On November 22-23, 2022, I organized a methodological workshop for the project’s collaborator Anna Lok. The workshop’s idea was to train Anna in the Dream Machine Methodology in order for her to lead a series of workshops for the queer Belarus community in a framework of do.less.lab, a well-being and resilience collective which, as stated on their website, radically proposed “to dive into the revolution of kindness to jointly regulate the stress of our nervous systems.” 

Since December 2021, Anna and I had been developing the Dream Machine workshop idea that initially we planned to run together in Berlin and then in Minsk. However, due to the political situation in Belarus and the full-scale invasion of Putin into Ukraine that erupted on February 24, 2022, we had to radically change the concept. Based on my experience running St. Petersburg’s workshop on Zoom with the collaborators on the ground, we started to implement the same plan for Belarus: together with one more collaborator-artist, Olga, Anna would be working with the participants in Minsk while I would be assisting to them through the zoom sessions and consultations. 

We met in Vilnius in November 2022, where I ran a two-day workshop informing Anna and Olga about the Dream Machine methodology, the project’s goals and its agenda, and previous experience in working with the community. I shared with them ideas on how to design the workshop, implement its stages within certain settings, imagine different possible themes to work with, writing sessions, bodily exercises, daily planning, etc. As a result of this methodological training, we put together a preliminary plan for a four-day workshop that Anna and Olga would be organize and lead in February 2022/March 2023. 

In December, Anna went to Tbilisi, Georgia, where she tested the Dream Machine methodology with a group of Belarus activists and artists, and shared her experience and results with our project.

Unfortunately, due to worsening the political situation in the region, we had to postpone the workshop in Belarus from February 2022/March 2023 to some better future times. However, sharing, teaching, and testing the Dream Machine methodology with one another has proved to us the importance of working together and remaining in contact and exchange despite the harshness of our political contexts and realities.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZER:

Masha Godovannaya

PARTICIPANTS:

Anna Lok

Olga S.

Workshop preparation

Vilnius workshop, November 2022

Tbilisi workshop, December 2022