Away From The Cognitive

In this roundtable conversation with Dr. Bert Derkx and Mette Sterre, you are invited to reflect on and dissect the Temper Tantrum Bonehouse experience. Together with the audience, we’ll explore what it means to return to the body and step out of the head.

Through conversation, we’ll consider how kinesthetics and movement keep us in touch with our reality, while also offering pathways into other realms. Themes include embodied knowledge, notions of sensing, non-linear forms of creation, and we will challenge the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Dr. Bert Derkx and Mette Sterre met during her residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, where she investigated the humbling physical force of intuition. Dr. Derkx’s insights into the sensations of the body deeply shaped Mette’s artistic practice—informing both its mental and physical dimensions.

Bert Derkx works as an advisor at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (National Academy of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam, where he acts as a bridge between art and science. Until he fell ill, he worked as a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, with one of his areas of interest being the construction of mind-body dualism in Western biomedical discourse. As an anthropologist and art historian, he is interested in the cultural diversity of perspectives on the body. These aspects also form the basis for his keen interest in the way contemporary artists depict the body in all its facets.