Bitesize Lecture with Danica Kuzmanovic

Danica Kuzmanovic, a psychologist from Croatia closed FoAM’s public programming for 2004, with an informal workshop on issues of communication in diverse collaborative groups and social settings.

In many transdisciplinary artistic projects, during intense and stressful working periods, it often happens that people’s personal and psychological issues can become closely entangled with the working process and strongly impact the final results. Quite commonly, these issues can be resolved without too much effort if at least one person in the team is aware of different techniques to channel negative stimuli towards more positive and constructive actions.

At FoAM, Danica gave an overview of the “theory of choice,” focusing on ways in which people tend to satisfy their four fundamental psychological needs and how their choices produce different social behaviours. She conducted a set of exercises regarding verbal and non-verbal communication, based on principles of tolerance and serendipity in collaborative settings.

In FoAM’s experience, whatever communication problems arise in a collaborative setting, food has never failed to provide a stimulus for an out-of-the-box problem solving. To end the lecture, we cooked up a banquet with tested and certified foods used in FoAM’s previous crisis situations, that have managed to glue the team back together when everything else seemed to be failing…