ENTER
CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN
EXPLORING HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN IMAGINATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY
BY FELIPE VIVEROS AND YASAMAN PISHVAEI
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Felipe Viveros is a Chilean born writer, facilitator, artist and strategist, who co-creates a diverse array of outputs across the post-capitalist sphere. Gathering experimental research on movement building, deep ecology and post capitalism, his practice focuses on challenging dominant narratives by centering the voices, knowledge and experience of the global majority, and BIPOC and Indigenous communities. With expertise in creative direction, facilitation, and strategic communication, Felipe convenes thought leaders, activists, and artists to co-create work that inspires action, systems change, immersive multimedia art, and experimental sound and music.
Yasaman (Yassi) Pishvaei is an Iranian multimedia artist, Expressive Arts practitioner, researcher, and the co-director of the Expressive Arts Institute in Berlin. Working at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and lived experience, her practice explores how the transformative and enigmatic qualities of art can deepen understanding and foster meaningful connection. Bringing together artistic modalities, embodied ways of knowing, and relational perspectives, she focuses on creating conditions where new forms of insight and experience can emerge.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS AND YASAMAN PISHVAEI
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Felipe Viveros is a Chilean born writer, facilitator, artist and strategist, who co-creates a diverse array of outputs across the post-capitalist sphere. Gathering experimental research on movement building, deep ecology and post capitalism, his practice focuses on challenging dominant narratives by centering the voices, knowledge and experience of the global majority, and BIPOC and Indigenous communities. With expertise in creative direction, facilitation, and strategic communication, Felipe convenes thought leaders, activists, and artists to co-create work that inspires action, systems change, immersive multimedia art, and experimental sound and music.
Yasaman (Yassi) Pishvaei is an Iranian multimedia artist, Expressive Arts practitioner, researcher, and the co-director of the Expressive Arts Institute in Berlin. Working at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and lived experience, her practice explores how the transformative and enigmatic qualities of art can deepen understanding and foster meaningful connection. Bringing together artistic modalities, embodied ways of knowing, and relational perspectives, she focuses on creating conditions where new forms of insight and experience can emerge.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS AND YASAMAN PISHVAEI
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Felipe Viveros is a Chilean born writer, facilitator, artist and strategist, who co-creates a diverse array of outputs across the post-capitalist sphere. Gathering experimental research on movement building, deep ecology and post capitalism, his practice focuses on challenging dominant narratives by centering the voices, knowledge and experience of the global majority, and BIPOC and Indigenous communities. With expertise in creative direction, facilitation, and strategic communication, Felipe convenes thought leaders, activists, and artists to co-create work that inspires action, systems change, immersive multimedia art, and experimental sound and music.
Yasaman (Yassi) Pishvaei is an Iranian multimedia artist, Expressive Arts practitioner, researcher, and the co-director of the Expressive Arts Institute in Berlin. Working at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and lived experience, her practice explores how the transformative and enigmatic qualities of art can deepen understanding and foster meaningful connection. Bringing together artistic modalities, embodied ways of knowing, and relational perspectives, she focuses on creating conditions where new forms of insight and experience can emerge.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS AND YASAMAN PISHVAEI
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Polydisciplinamory, Care, Art and Rhizomatic Connections in Times of Collapse and Renewal.
These manoeuvres, particularly between art and philosophy, make me feel like an adulterous spouse. Each field demands my full energy, attention, and commitment; each resents my involvement with the other; each suspects such involvement when I am absent; each feels personally betrayed when this suspicion is confirmed; and each is absolutely and unconditionally unwilling to concede any legitimacy to that involvement, much less make any accommodation to it. Each field is morally outraged by the suggestion that I am a resource that might be shared with the other, to the ultimate advantage of both.
— Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,”
“We think we already know how to see, and that we seers are thus wholly active in our seeing. The painter knows this is not true. We must look in order to see, and the painter knows that she does not yet know how to look so as to see the thing as it shows itself. So she lets things teach her how to look”
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We live in an age marked by systems collapse, a rapidly changing cultural environment and a digital age marked by information overload, and an acute scarcity of attention, care and imagination. Capitalism-fuelled social media, corporate propaganda, influencer culture, and the advent of AI technology flood our feeds with fragmented, commodified and addictive content that most often than not lack context, reflexivity, substance and positionality. These fragmented bits of information are optimised to sell, to hopefully spread virally, instead of inform the public they often misinform and influence culture perpetuating harmful notions, what Naomi Klein called “shock therapy”. Research shows that in online environments saturated with information, low-quality content can spread as widely as—or even more than—high-quality alternatives, contributing to superficial engagement (Qiu et al., 2017). Moreover, these dynamics frequently reflect extractive patterns, where marginalised cultural expressions are appropriated and commodified without proper attribution or ethical engagement (Park, 2022).
In an attempt to counteract hegemonic narratives and commodified epistemologies, the authors became interested in a new field that explores the intersection of philosophy, art-based research and healing modalities :Expressive Arts or EXA. The relatively new field of research and practice offers a space for what Maxine Greene calls "wide awakeness", a state of heightened perception and engagement with the world that opens pathways for deep inquiry (Greene, 1995). Art, in this sense, is not mere representation but a form of revelation. Expressive Arts is embedded in phenomenology, emphasiing the immediacy of lived experience and the unfolding of meaning in the moment.
As practitioners and artists living in the diaspora, the writers were interested in many ways of knowing and being, beyond the hegemonic Europe-centric conceptualisation and practice of art. Like many of you, we are interested in knowledge creating and production through the lenses of transdisciplinarity, or even better polydisciplinamory.
In her book How to Make Art at the End of the World, Canadien Professor Natalie’s Loveless describes [the neologism] poly-disciplinamory as aiming at, “not only [at] the invocation of multiplicity that polydisciplinary study offers, but also at holding space for amory in both the sense of psychoanalytic libidinal cathexis and transference love (the supposition of desired/desirable knowledge to an other). It asks how the perspectives mobilized under the sign of polyamory offer a way to ground the love- of- knowledge that animates the relation marked by the sujet supposé savoir, unpinning our allegiance to discipline, and replacing an Imaginary relation to knowledge (the fullness of content) with a psychoanalytically ethical one attentive both to the desire that emerges at the site of the sujet supposé savoir, and to the drive I have been naming curiosity, a drive that erupts and takes us over. Here, polydisciplinamory, as a kind of eros- driven- curiosity, becomes an organizational principle for research creation, one that helps tutor us in managing the frictions, dissonances, and different demands required by not only more than one discipline but more than one form, and to recognize these negotiations as always already imbricated in structures of power.”
Similarly, the concept of poiesis, central to EXA—knowing through making—suggests that knowledge emerges not from premeditated outcomes, but from the act of creation itself. This type of knowing within itself involves a process of unlearning and unknowing, a suspension of the dominant paradigms of certainty and control. Like the Valley Of Bewilderment described in Attar's Conference of the Birds, the journey through Expressive Arts often leads one into a liminal space, where previously held truths dissolve and the self is stripped of attachments to inherited knowledge. In this valley, Attar writes, “Bewilderment will seize the soul,” pointing to a sacred disorientation that clears the ground for divine insight (Attar, 1984). Such bewilderment mirrors the Expressive Arts process, in which the maker releases prior knowing and enters a space where the work reveals rather than represents.
This resonates deeply with the Sufi understanding of fana, the annihilation of the ego in order to encounter the Divine. The creative act becomes a devotional practice, not in service of self-expression alone, but in the pursuit of self-transcendence. In this light, Expressive Arts is not simply therapeutic or aesthetic, but initiatory: a rite of passage into new states of being, where knowledge is not acquired but received. Through poiesis, the practitioner does not just make art; they are made by it.
As Steven Levine, a prominent thinker, scholar and leader in the field of Expressive Arts puts it, "In Expressive Arts, it is the aesthetic quality of the experience that calls forth the response, not the accuracy of representation or fidelity to form" (Levine, 1997). This aesthetic engagement invites the artist-researcher-seeker to surrender control, allowing the work to emerge through them rather than from them. This aligns profoundly with phenomenological methods, which prioritise openness, presence, and the suspension of judgment—what Edmund Husserl called a return "to the things themselves"—a phrase that emphasises direct engagement with experience and was further developed by philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Husserl, 1931; Heidegger, 1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Art-oriented scholars like Shaun McNiff (1998) and Ronald J. Pelias (2004) have long advocated for arts-based research (ABR) as a legitimate and powerful method of inquiry, enabling a dwelling within ambiguity, contradiction, and embodied insight. Artistic processes offer not only a mode of expression but also a means of knowing that transcends propositional logic.
I believe that the architecture of an Expressive Arts session can be understood as a gentle yet profound method of inquiry. It becomes a container for navigating the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, drawing forth latent embodied wisdom and ways of knowing. This structure bears a strong resemblance to Sufi mysticism, which emphasise experiential realisation, inner transformation, and divine remembrance (dhikr) as pathways to knowledge.
The architecture of an Expressive Arts session orinquiry can be viewed as unfolding in four stages:
1. The Filling In — The session or the inquiry begins with identifying a quest—something that needs to be seen, heard, or known through you. This is not goalsetting in the conventional sense, but rather listening for a call from within. As in the Sufi path, this stage aligns with talab, or the yearning that initiates spiritual journeying (Ernst, 1997).
2. Decentering — In this stage, insight arises not from cognitive control but from surrendering to the creative process. Here, the practitioner steps aside from preconceived ideas and assumptions, allowing something new—or newly seen within the familiar—to emerge. This parallels Attar's concept of losing the self to find deeper knowing in The Conference of the Birds (Attar, 1984).
“When your soul is absorbed into the Ocean,
it is saved from its own oblivion.
That’s when creativity abounds
and the mysteries of life begin to unveil.”
(Attar, 2017, p.308)
3. Aesthetic Analysis — This involves contemplative engagement with the creation. Whether a visual image, movement, sound, or ephemeral performance, the work is honoured as a living artifact. Reflection occurs not only through intellect but through embodied, emotional, and sensory memory. Staying with the work allows for meaning to unfold in its own time, echoing what Eisner (2002) describes as the "education of perception." In Sufi traditions, this resonates with mushāhada—the act of witnessing through unveiled presence. Mushāhada is not mere observation, but a devotional seeing that integrates the aesthetic and the divine, where beauty (jamāl) becomes a conduit for inner transformation.
4. Harvesting — The final stage entails gathering insights, patterns, and fragments of wisdom from the creative and reflective processes. The practitioner synthesises what has emerged—sometimes directly addressing the initial inquiry, but at times reframing it, complicating it, or revealing previously hidden layers. This harvesting is both epistemic and ethical: a commitment to remain in dialogue with the process, to receive what has been gifted, and to carry it forward. In Sufi terms, this aligns with ma‘rifa—a form of intimate, experiential knowledge born not from books or discursive reasoning, but from direct engagement through the heart. Ma‘rifa represents the culmination of spiritual insight, where understanding stems from lived experience and ultimately becomes lived knowledge.
Art is thus both epistemological and ontological—it reveals not only how we know, but also who we are, and who we become. It challenges the Cartesian divide and invites a more integrated, intuitive form of knowing. In this spirit, artistic creation becomes not an illustration of knowledge, but an inquiry, a mode of engaging with the unknown with humility, curiosity, and presence.
Emerging from these reflections, I propose the term “wild knowledge” to describe a way of knowing that is non-domesticated, but rather intuitive, and emergent. This concept builds on Gary Snyder’s redefinition of the “wild.” In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder reframes wildness not as chaotic or uncivilised, but as a vital mode of being that “fiercely resists any oppression, confinement, or exploitation... artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic” (Snyder, 1990, p.11). Rather than placing humans at the centre, his vision invites entanglement with the more-than-human world and calls for a reorientation of our ways of being and knowing.
In the context of Expressive Arts and phenomenological inquiry, wild knowledge signals a commitment to unknowing, to surrendering control, and to allowing meaning to emerge through deep relational engagement with materials, the body, memory, mystery, and the land. It resists systematisation and embraces ambiguity. Like the Sufi notion of ma‘rifa, it arises not through instruction but through direct experience, transformation, and devotion.
To know wildly is not to dominate knowledge but to dance with it—to be shaped by what arises, to sense and respond rather than to predict and prescribe; to be open to multitude of ways of knowing and being. In this light, wild knowledge is both an epistemology and an ethics: a way of knowing that honours the unknown, the ineffable, and the sacred in the act of making and becoming.
Felipe Viveros is a Chilean born writer, facilitator, artist and strategist, who co-creates a diverse array of outputs across the post-capitalist sphere. Gathering experimental research on movement building, deep ecology and post capitalism, his practice focuses on challenging dominant narratives by centering the voices, knowledge and experience of the global majority, and BIPOC and Indigenous communities. With expertise in creative direction, facilitation, and strategic communication, Felipe convenes thought leaders, activists, and artists to co-create work that inspires action, systems change, immersive multimedia art, and experimental sound and music.
Yasaman (Yassi) Pishvaei is an Iranian multimedia artist, Expressive Arts practitioner, researcher, and the co-director of the Expressive Arts Institute in Berlin. Working at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and lived experience, her practice explores how the transformative and enigmatic qualities of art can deepen understanding and foster meaningful connection. Bringing together artistic modalities, embodied ways of knowing, and relational perspectives, she focuses on creating conditions where new forms of insight and experience can emerge.