UNICArt lead hosts Artistic Thinking workshop at RITU in Liège

13 Aug 2026

UNICArt lead in UCC, Dr Brice Catherin is an artist and postdoctoral researcher. Together with Maria Sappho, an artist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Huddersfield, he designed and hosted a workshop at the Rencontres Internationales de Théâtre Universitaire (RITU) in Liège in February. The event took place from February 24-28.  

Dr Catherin led the two-day research-creation workshop and performance ‘Edible Commiseration’ at RITU, Université de Liège, as part of the international colloquium ‘Le repas, un rituel social et culturel’, dedicated to meals as social, cultural, symbolic and theatrical rituals. 

He explained, that "the workshop explored commiseration, consumption, embodied knowledge and experiential knowledge through a performance-art process in which five highly committed graduate and postgraduate students sculpted edible body fragments from marzipan and halva, wrote compelling texts specifically for the performance, and shared these with conference/festival attendees. It was particularly meaningful to present a more performance-art-leaning workshop within a theatre festival and research conference, and to do so in an extremely intercultural context, with attendees from across Europe, South America and Africa. The final sharing of texts and food created an intense, concrete moment of intimacy, critical witnessing and experiential knowledge.”