Vision Lab Laboratory of Belonging

A Participatory Arts Festival + Immersive Retreat with 25 international artists, musicians, scholars & contemplative practitioners. 25 international artists, musicians, scholars and contemplative practitioners gather in Harvard Square for an unusual weekend of music, performance, ritual, poetry, movement, contemplative practice and collective experimentation. Join Vision Lab for an Immersive Art Celebration in the Mikelson Room at First Parish Church, Cambridge, MA — two connected gatherings closing out our presence at Harvard's PES Belonging Conference weekend. SATURDAY · 7–10 PM EVENING FESTIVAL Music · Performance · Poetry · Ritual · Art · Dance A Festival of Sufi qawwali · Turkish Ensemble Music · Spoken Word · Performance · Animalia · Water Ritual · Altar-making · A Somatic Experience with Music & Dance Come listen, move, make, contemplate, celebrate, and experiment with what it means to belong. Wear comfortable clothes. SUNDAY · 3–7 PM IMMERSIVE ARTS RETREAT Sound · Movement · Contemplation · Arts Installations · Collective Practice - Bring comfortable/movement friendly clothing. Turning quietly inward. Unhurried processes of embodiment, contemplation, and visual arts in shared reflection, collective discussion, and collaborative opportunities. VISIONLab x Harvard Belonging Conference Be sure to attend Vision Lab's Official Harvard PES Belonging conference hour, "Living the Future Now: Vision Lab's Laboratory of Belonging," on Saturday, Sept. 26 @ 5:30–6:30 PM, Harvard Divinity School, James Room East Register Here What is VISIONLab? Founded at Harvard Divinity School, VisionLab is an experimental laboratory in the future of the human spirit—where artistic practice, contemplative study, and scholarly research gathers in sustained relation to cultivate depth, ethical attentiveness, and forms of making and thinking responsive to the present moment. A sustained space where global artistic practice, spiritual life, and scholarship are brought into genuine relation, and where the conditions are created for work that actually matters to take form in the world. What began through conversations at Harvard Divinity School has grown into an international collective of more than 100 artists, researchers, scholars, and contemplative practitioners, united less by discipline or institution than by a shared orientation toward depth, experimentation, and the kind of attention that takes time. What this looks like in practice: an artist-scholar from the Philippines developing healing performances in response to ecological precarity and historical trauma; a researcher in Southern Europe working with local communities around one of the continent's last free-flowing rivers; others developing projects around care ecologies, more-than-human belonging, sacred art practices, and artistic responses to climate grief. These efforts do not develop in isolation. They take shape in relation to one another, sustained by honest feedback, continuity, and the presence of a community that keeps returning. For many participants, that sustained presence is not supplementary to the work. It is what makes the work possible. We are living in a moment of profound cultural fragmentation, when the inherited forms for thinking, making, and practicing together are no longer adequate to what we are facing. Artists, scholars, and contemplatives are often doing the most necessary work of reimagining those forms — and doing it alone, without the conditions that allow the work to deepen and connect. Vision Lab is an attempt to change that: to create, carefully and experimentally, a space in which that work can flourish, and from which something genuinely new might emerge. For more information and how to participate, visit: https://visionlabcollective.com/Offerings-and-Contact If you are not able to attend in person but wish to view our gathering via live stream, please email [email protected] or contact us through this page to receive a link by donation!