Laura Geiger
You can believe in a different world and still participate in reproducing this one
I create artistic and participatory practices for noticing how we make worlds together and discovering what becomes possible when the conditions change.
Our values don't automatically determine our participation.
We can care about autonomy and still organize around someone else's experience.
We can value difference and still rush to make it familiar.
We can oppose hierarchy and still take responsibility before anyone asks.
We can want uncertainty and still make it disappear.
We can listen and still tell someone what they mean.
We can help and still make ourselves necessary.
This isn’t because we don’t care. We have learned these ways of participating so well that they can stop feeling like choices.
And sometimes what feels like care, competence, or responsibility is also carrying something forward that we don't intend.
If you've ever noticed that your intentions and your participation don't always meet, this is where the inquiry begins.
You can't interrupt what you can't perceive.
This is where my work begins.
I create situations where familiar ways of participating become strange enough to perceive, so that what seemed inevitable can become available for choice.
A small change can be enough: a pause, a different distance, an object without a name, a responsibility that isn't immediately picked up, a listener who doesn't tell you what you mean.
Something we thought we understood becomes unfamiliar, what we thought we had to do becomes optional, or what we thought was one thing becomes several.
The gap between what we intend and what our participation makes possible becomes something we can encounter.
Why this matters
We don't just participate in relationships, conversations, organizations, classrooms, and communities. Through participation, we help determine what becomes possible within them.
A world doesn't only reproduce itself through laws, policies, and institutions. It is also reproduced through what we do with one another every day.
The speed and familiarity of our participation can determine what gets noticed, whose experience becomes central, what counts as real, what gets absorbed into what we already know, and what possibilities never get a chance to appear.
Alterity arrives already political. The question is what we do with it when we encounter it.
If I decide too quickly what you mean, I haven't merely made a conversational mistake. I've helped determine what kind of person you can be in relation to me.
If I make your difference familiar enough for me to understand, I've potentially reduced what can appear.
If I help in a way that makes myself necessary, I've potentially reproduced dependency while experiencing myself as caring.
If I take responsibility before anyone asks, I've potentially reproduced hierarchy while experiencing myself as helpful.
Change the conditions of participation, and what we can perceive changes. What we perceive changes what becomes possible.
The work
Deep Puppetry™
Love, Projection, and Puppets
What happens when we love something we can never fully know?
A puppet is an object, and then suddenly it isn't. We see someone in it. Something wants something, and a relationship begins.
We project, recognize, care, imagine, respond. The puppet gives us almost nothing back, and somehow, something happens between us.
Deep Puppetry is an artistic practice for exploring that something.
Through puppets, objects, movement, and encounters, we investigate projection, attachment, recognition, love, and the strange ways we make relationships with things that cannot tell us who they are. What happens when what we see in something isn't simply there? What happens when it isn't simply ours either?
What might become possible if we could love what exceeds our understanding?
Witnessing Without Colonizing
What becomes possible when another person's experience doesn't have to become my understanding of it?
We recognize, reassure, interpret, explain, and care. These are familiar ways of participating in relationship, and they can also shape what another person is able to become in the encounter.
Witnessing Without Colonizing is a practice of staying in relationship with experience before familiarity becomes certainty.
It can happen between partners, parents and children, facilitators and groups, friends, or within our relationship with ourselves.
Explore Witnessing Without Colonizing
Unfinished Neighbours
What happens when something becomes your neighbour before you know what it is?
Large handmade figures enter a shared space without a fixed identity, function, or story. People decide what to do with them. They carry them, move them, play with them, attach them to their bodies, bring them into their own worlds—or simply stop and look.
The encounters become part of the artwork. Unfinished Neighbours is a site-responsive artwork for museums, cultural institutions, public spaces, festivals, schools, and communities.
The figures are not the finished work. The encounters are part of the composition.
One inquiry. Different forms.
These aren't separate answers to separate questions. They are different places where the larger inquiry becomes visible.
What happens when we change the conditions of an encounter? What becomes perceptible? What becomes possible?
Deep Puppetry explores this through objects and puppetry. Witnessing Without Colonizing explores it through relationship. Unfinished Neighbours explores it through shared space.
The form changes. The inquiry continues.
What people discover
The work doesn't produce the same insight for everyone. It gives people a place to notice what becomes possible when the conditions change.
“Without the name, it became Other.”
“I found myself not wanting to be in charge.”
“Distance became less important than orientation.”
“I handed on responsibility, and she took it.”
“Play became possible.”
“It was a real pleasure not to be told what I meant.”
These aren't outcomes I prescribe. They're things people have discovered while participating.
The Living Inquiry
Some questions aren't ready to become practices yet.
Sometimes I have an idea I can't quite leave alone, or a practice raises a question I don't know how to answer. I can think I understand something and then realize I don't.
The Living Inquiry is where I bring one of those questions to a group of people and think with them.
One question, ninety minutes. No preparation required.
The question might come from Deep Puppetry, Witnessing Without Colonizing, an encounter that hasn't become a practice yet, or simply something that keeps returning.
Work with Laura
I work with organizations, cultural institutions, educational communities, festivals, and other groups through workshops, longer inquiries, artistic commissions, and site-responsive projects. I don't come with a predetermined solution.
I compose conditions that make something previously difficult to perceive available for attention.
From there, we find out what becomes possible.
The larger question
If we want a different world, we may need ways of seeing, wanting, relating, and participating that we don't yet know how to inhabit.
What might become possible if we were less completely determined by the ways of participating we've inherited?
I don't have a finished answer. That's part of why the work continues.
Where the inquiry has traveled
This inquiry has developed through almost twenty years of practice across education, public art, facilitation, community practice, and organizational life.
Rutgers University · University of North Carolina · Anna Lindh Foundation · Misk Global Forum · Malmö Folkuniversitet · Helsingborg Municipality · Festival of Ecology, Stage and Transformation · Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada · Toronto District School Board · Skillinge Teater