Orbit - workshop on female gaze, Alma Dorner

A collective gaze unfolding through dialogue and reflection

Now in its third edition, Orbit – Female Gaze turns its focus to media and the moving image.

This ongoing project began through conversations among visual creators, where a shared realization emerged: the ways we create and interpret images are deeply shaped by long-established visual norms — often unconsciously aligned with a dominant gaze shaped by patriarchal history. This workshop invites us to pause, reflect, and reconsider the lenses through which we look and make.

We are not presenting a fixed definition of the "female gaze," we propose a space for exploration — where perspectives intersect and new questions emerge. Together, we’ll critically engage with the politics of looking: who gets seen, who does the looking, and how stories are shaped through visual culture.

In this session, we’ll unpack the history of gaze in visual culture. Through a film screening — including excerpts from works like Brainwashed by Nina Menkes — we’ll examine how media influences perception and reality. Analyzing the scale of the importance that displays the showing of the female body or the voice and verbal expression of woman.

Workshop Structure

The workshop will unfold in three parts:

Introduction

A framing of key concepts around the gaze, authorship, and representation, setting the context for collective inquiry.

Key sources:

Caliban and the Witch Woman, the Body and primitive Accumulation – Silvia Federici

Feminist Persectives on the Body – Barbara Brook

Film Session/Dramaturgy

Viewing and discussing selected excerpts that illustrate the dominance of the patriarchal gaze, alongside works identified with the female gaze. This session includes a reflection on dramaturgy and the narrative power structures embedded in visual storytelling.

Individual Exercise

Participants will analyze a story that they brought to the workshop, using the FROM_FUNCTION method and working in their preferred format—such as video, photography, illustration, performance, or writing.

Throughout the workshop next to the key sources, there will be space to have open dialgue and sharing of embodied experiences to understand the topic thought different lenses.

Preparation

Each participant is asked to bring a story, where a woman plays a role in it or is somehow connected to the topic of gaze that they find intriguing or fascinating. This can come from any source—film, opera, journalism, literature, dance, documentary, etc.—and will serve as material for personal exploration and creative response.

Participants: max 9 people

(For everyone that devines themselves as woman, nonbinary individuals, they/them, or doesn’t want to define themselves)

When: 24th October, 12:00–17:00

Where: Lab-1, Eindhoven

Snacks provided

More info: https://orbital.cargo.site/