Catalysti + Vuotalo

Catalysti and Vuotalo collaborated in Fall 2025 for a series of artist-led workshops celebrating dance, drawing and sound, zine-making, clay and language, symbols of protection, and mushroom imaginaries.

Across six gatherings, artists invite participants into shared processes of movement, listening, sculpting, imagining, publishing, and making. Each workshop explores how creativity can become a space for connection, care, belonging, and collective imagination. The participating artist were: Mercedes Balarezo Fernández, Ana Gutieszca, Özgü Gündeşlioğlu, Daniela Pascual Esparza, Kemê, and Phan Nguyen

Pleasure Triple Play

Artist: Mercedes Balarezo Fernández

A collective dance workshop rooted in joy, rhythm, and belonging. Inspired by neuroscience’s idea of the “pleasure double play” (music + movement), this workshop adds a third dimension: the pleasure of dancing together.

Participants revisit the everyday dance gestures their bodies already know — from kitchens, living rooms, and streets — and transform them into a shared celebration. Grooving, shaking, twirling, jumping, pausing, and connecting unfold across a two-hour collective journey.

Sonic Pencils

Artist: Ana Gutieszca

What does a drawing sound like?

Using specially invented sonic pencils that transform drawing into sound in real time, participants explore a sensory world where lines become tones and gestures become audio landscapes. Drawing shifts into a playful act of listening — activating sight and sound simultaneously.

Sculpt Your Finnish

Artist: Özgü Gündeşlioğlu

Can language be shaped by hand?

This clay-based workshop explores Finnish words through touch rather than textbooks. Feelings and meanings — warmth, calm, home — are sculpted into tactile forms. Individual word-sculptures gather into a temporary collaborative installation, where personal interpretations meet and mingle like conversation.

Imaginary Mushrooms

Artist: Daniela Pascual Esparza

What if we became mushrooms?

Through movement, playful exercises, and imagination, participants explore fungal life as a way of thinking differently. The session culminates in the creation of personal mushroom cards made through drawing and collage — small companions of imaginative transformation.

Symbols of Protection

Artist: Kemê

This workshop explores how protection can be translated into image and form. Drawing from personal, cultural, and inherited symbols, participants create small protective gestures — images that hold wishes for safety, care, and community.

Through making, symbols shift from private meaning to shared offering. The resulting works can be taken home or left behind as collective markers of care, carrying intentions forward into the coming year.

A Zine Workshop: “Scores for Home-Making”

Artist: Phan Nguyen

How can home be made through the smallest gestures?

Drawing from the ongoing project House4Resistance, this workshop approaches home not as a fixed location but as a fluid practice shaped by rituals, sounds, memories, and everyday acts of care. Participants create personal mini-zines composed of “scores” — simple instructions or reflections that translate lived experiences of belonging onto paper.

Through cutting, sequencing, drawing, and writing, individual publications emerge alongside the possibility of a collective zine. Home becomes something portable, reassembled, and shared.