Recap - Workshops on transdisciplinary storytelling and co-creation of a short film
The project
In 2024, we started an unconventional project. Together, with actor Maximilian Grünewald, Filmmaker Oliver Rossol, and musicians Niklas Kraft and Philip Theurer, eight researchers participate in four workshops to explore transdisciplinary storytelling. In these workshops, we used non-scientific narrations to learn about storytelling beyond modern western world views focussing on the origin stories within Northern mythology and the Edda. We used acting techniques to reimagine storytelling, moving away from standard research methods. Each participant brought their own perspective, combining individual scientific research with mythology. It was part experiment, part creative exploration - trying to understand how stories are created and shared.
The collaborative project resulted in a short film called "How to Begin". This movie serves as a reflection and documentation of this process and hopefully, stimulate thinking and discussion on knowledge and storytelling.
Erzählende Wissenschaften - Ein Film erschafft die Welt
On November 8th, scientists, artists and curious minds gathered at the Science & Culture FORUM 2024 during the Berlin Science Week for our Geo.X event “Erzählende Wissenschaften - Ein Film erschafft die Welt!”. Here, we unveiled "How to Begin", a transdisciplinary short film how storytelling can bridge the worlds of science and art.
After the screening, four of our actors - Sophia Dosch, Laura Lehnhoff, Edgar Kutschera, Márk Somogyvári - shared personal insights and lessons learned from this science collaboration. This engaging exchange was followed by an inspiring discussion on storytelling, featuring Antje Boetius, a leading marine biologist, and theater director Alexander Eisenach. Together, they highlighted storytelling’s power to communicate science and how an artistic perspective can open and enrich our “scientific” view and thinking.
How to begin - Description
Project description
‘How to Begin’ is a transdisciplinary short film project that was presented as part of Berlin Science Week 2024. The film is based on four workshops in which a team of scientists and artists came together to weave the imaginary world of Norse mythology and scientific perspectives into a common narrative material - text, music and image. The result is a fascinating experiment that blurs the boundaries between subjective and objective knowledge.
Storytelling, the deeply human need to understand the world by telling stories, can be found in mythology, theatre, cinema and literature. While art would be unthinkable without storytelling, the concept becomes complicated for scientists: Can you tell your own research subject as an exciting story without losing objectivity?
But what if we could overcome these boundaries? Exactness, repeatability and objectivity are only seemingly at odds with intuition, processuality and narrativity. Scientists and artists can inspire each other in their questions, methods and workflows because they share a fundamental commonality: the urge to research