24 October 2026
Camilla Wellton had been invited by Statens konstråd to join a two-day conversation about embodied dialogue at Samtidskonstdagarna 2026. By the time her group presented its work at Uppsala Castle on 15 October, it had found a way to begin without an explanatory sentence: three choruses of voices flowed into the opening hum of a documentary made from the previous day.
The conversation was Theme 6, “Daring to dialogue: embodied approaches to engaging each other”. Its question was what movement, attention and shared experience can bring into dialogue alongside words. Samtidskonstdagarna 2026 was produced by Statens konstråd, part of the Moderna Museet authority, with Uppsala Municipality and Region Uppsala. Theme 6 brought together Professor John-Paul Zaccarini, body philosopher and performance artist Vishnu Vardhani Rajan, artist Cecilia Germain and Camilla, author of the I AWAKE series.
On Wednesday 14 October at Teater Aros, John-Paul and Vishnu led workshops with the participants while Camilla documented their work. Cecilia worked with the group to prepare food, bringing taste into a conversation about how people sense and communicate. On Thursday morning, Camilla led the group through a longer workshop to revisit what had happened. It was both a debrief and a chance to notice how quickly an experience turns into an account of itself.
What a name can't say
She didn’t begin by asking for names. Instead, she invited each person to offer a sound for who they experienced themselves to be in that room, at that moment, among those people. A given name can stay constant while the person who answers to it changes. Camilla wanted that difference to be felt before anyone was asked to explain it.
From there, she guided a sequence of smaller-group conversations. Participants revisited Wednesday’s workshops, compared impressions and gave each exchange a sound. Breath, feeling and the pitch of a voice could enter the conversation with the words. Camilla asked whether the group had arrived at a shared insight, then drew attention to the assumption in her own question. What if they hadn’t? What if the useful thing was to notice how each mind had filtered and labelled the same day differently?
At the end of the morning, Camilla showed the participants a documentary she had assembled from Wednesday’s video and sound. It opened with their earlier humming. The group decided that the live presentation should meet that sound: Camilla arranged participants into three choruses, and their voices opened the presentation in the castle’s Rikssalen before mingling with the film’s opening hum. The documentary ran for roughly ten minutes.
In I AWAKE, Camilla pairs narrative and reflection with guided audio and practices that invite a reader back to an insight after the page is turned. In Uppsala, that concern took a public form. The group didn’t have to reduce two days to a tidy verdict. It could let an audience hear how its encounter had begun, and how it had changed.
Camilla thanks Professor John-Paul Zaccarini, Vishnu Vardhani Rajan and Cecilia Germain for the collaboration, Statens konstråd and Moderna Museet for the gathering, and Jeanne van Heeswijk and Giorgiana Zachia for their contributions.
The official Theme 6 page names the contributors and records the two-day conversation.
To request an interview or images, or to ask whether the workshop documentary is available, tell Camilla what you are covering and when you need the material.
For other I AWAKE announcements, browse the press release archive.
