A creative tour of the exhibition “The Word Embodied” and a meeting “Is a notary a woman? How Language Affects Reality and How Reality Creates Language”

CSW offer for groups from secondary schools and individual audiences

How does language affect how we see the world? Do words only describe reality, or do they also shape it? And does the form “notary” evoke in our imagination a woman as easily as a man?

On October 23, we invite groups from secondary schools and individual audiences to a special meeting around the exhibition “The Word Embodied”. We will combine a creative tour of the exhibition with interactive classes on the relationship between language and reality. This is a proposal that can be an interesting complement to the Polish language lesson.

A creative tour of the exhibition “The Word Embodied” and a meeting “Is a notary a woman? How Language Affects Reality and How Reality Creates Language”

Exhibition “The Word Embodied”

1st floor of the CSW

We will spend the first part of the meeting at the exhibition. The visit will be accompanied by an introduction to its most important topics and tasks related to the presented works.

“The Word Embodied” is an international exhibition of contemporary artists working with text and various forms of verbal expression. The word here is not only a sign — it is associated with the body, emotions and experience, it becomes a whisper, a manifesto, a cry and an action. The artists use textiles, embroidery, neon lights, video and interactive activities, also taking up the theme of language as a tool to recover the voice, visibility and agency of women.

Conducted by: Patrycja Wójcik, CSW Education Department

Interactive class “Is a notary a woman? How Language Affects Reality, and How Reality Creates Language

Audiovisual room in building B

“The limits of my language indicate the limits of my world,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. During the course, we will consider whether language only describes the world, or whether it also affects how we perceive, organize and value it.

We will learn about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and with the examples of color names, metaphors, feminatives and masculine forms, we will see how language creates categories and triggers specific associations. We will also look at the metaphors embodied in Lakoff and Johnson's approach — such as “being on top”, “having something on your head” or “carrying the burden of responsibility” — and examine how the experience of the body helps us understand abstract concepts.

We will also talk about how feminatives affect the ideas about different professions and the visibility of women in the language.

Classes will be based on short assignments, language experiments and answers using Mentimeter.

After the meeting, participants will be able to better recognize the influence of language on the way of perceiving reality, point out examples of embodied metaphors, and critically analyze the way language describes people and social roles.

Conducted by: dr Marta Wudarska — Head of Communication Department at Wilam Horzyca Theatre in Toruń, PR specialist and cultural animator. A graduate of Polish philology at the University of Applied Sciences, where she also defended her doctoral dissertation in the Department of Anthropology of Literature. Scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage and laureate of the Kulturalny Krawat award in the category of Cultural Animator. She conducted more than 60 author meetings, including with Joanna Bator, Marcin Wicha, Jack Dehnel, Sylwia Chutnik, Robert Małecki and Jack Hugo-Bader.