Anatolii Kozlov, (Université de Genève)
What is common between the creativity tests and meat-imitating food? Between social interactions and formal modelling? Between the trembling Earth and a trembling body? The workshop that took place on 15–16 November 2025, at the Charité Museum of Medical History in Berlin, offered an answer: performativity.
The workshop was titled “Representing, Reshaping Reenacting: Performance studies and practices meet the history, philosophy, and social studies of science and medicine”. It was organised by Dr. Sasha Bergstrom-Katz and Dr. Michele Luchetti (both – University of Bielefield) and supported by the funding from the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM). The event was attended by a group of scholars (in performing arts, the medical humanities, philosophy, history, and sociology of science and medicine) and art practitioners, all coming from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, UK, US, Canada. The unusual line up of the participants found itself in an unusual venue.An old Rudolf Virchow’s Ruin Lecture Hall, a spacious room with large windows divided into two large volumes by the solemn remains of a brick wall. A large-format photograph of Rudolf Virchow himself, a famous pathologist captured in the midst of a public lecture presenting his knowledge to the audience, hung upon the wall.
All the more striking was the contrast between the photo of a classical lecturer educating his audience and the dynamic, polyvalent, fluctuating workshop. If Virchow’s lectures, in present-day terminology, can be called an example of the knowledge deficit model of science and medical communication, the workshop created a dynamic participatory space, where speakers turned into listeners and listeners into speakers, and all the participants rotated roles, probing unusual scenarios, and exploring the possibilities for different formats of knowledge exchange.
Thus, the two-day workshop kicked off with the museum walk through, guided by Leonie Braam, and it set the exploratory tone for the rest of the programme. What followed was a series of interactive talks and performative interventions, all probing the concept of performance in relation to medical and scientific knowledge and practices. Throughout the workshop, performativity proved to be a fruitful vantage point for the critical engagement with a number of different themes and topics, such as the history of child creativity tests, neurodiversity through the lens of rhythm-based view of social interactions, the practice of formal modelling in cognitive science, academic supervision and medical instruction, medical museum objects and meat-imitating products, and others. All these were analysed through the lens of performativity and as forms of performances.
One of the central features of performance is its physical embodiment and experientiality. Performances occur in physical spaces, in which performers, participants, objects of performance and observers, all form webs of relationships that unfold in time through unique perspectival experiences. This experiential fabric was vividly surfaced and explored in the performative interventions by the contributors of the workshop. For example, we had a chance to reconstruct the history of museum objects by observation and touch, to experience what is it to be tested on intelligence a hundred years ago in the US (quite a rough ride), what is it to be taken care of, what is it to diagnose and to be diagnosed; we could also observe the parallels between physiological trembling and geophysical trembling. Through all these experiences it had become clear how our knowledge is relational and multi-modal: touch, smell, rhythm, proprioception, narrativity, emotions, and not just vision and discursively codified knowledge, are the gateways to medical knowledge and medical practices.
For the public event on the evening of the first day, the room was nearly full. The audience keenly listened to Alex Mermikides’s story of Chimera, a collaborative theatre company that devises shows about medical experience. Further, the audience was presented with a performative work-in-progress by Lucie Strecker and Mariella Greil, which offered an embodied insight on the seismic landscape of an ecologically, politically, and economically shaken world community. Both the presentation and performance raised quite a lot of interest, so the Q&A session went longer than the planned half hour. The public event was followed by a social dinner, and it gave the contributors of the workshop a chance to connect in a more informal setting, strengthen the cohesion of the group over a meal in a restaurant nearby. Some of the conversations that were launched during the dinner got nicely carried over to the second day of the workshop.
As Hannah Star Rogers, an STS expert from the Medical Museion, Copenhagen, who joined the workshop as an external observer, noted in her concluding remarks, all contributions, despite very different professional trajectories, revealed strong synergies. The group as a whole showed promise for becoming an exemplary interdisciplinary community with a forward-looking and humanistically-oriented vision of science and medicine. This positive feeling was shared by the participants too, and the group is now keenly discussing the format of the joint collaborative publication. If all goes well, soon there might be a chance to read about the contributions of the participants.