laura geiger
Relational Fieldwork
Practice environments for studying participation, coordination, and meaning as they emerge in real time
Most interaction moves toward rapid coherence. Roles settle, meaning stabilizes, and responsibility distributes itself, usually before we notice it happening.
This work creates live conditions where those moments can be slowed down, perceived, and worked with directly.
ways to enter the work
witnessing without colonizing
Staying with interaction before meaning settles
A live relational practice where participants work with interpretation, coordination pressure, and the impulse to stabilize moments too quickly.
Participation roles lab
Watching participation organize itself in real time
A short live relational experiment where recurring interaction roles become visible as groups coordinate tension, responsibility, and meaning together.
school of the small and imperfect
Long-term relational fieldwork
An ongoing practice environment for developing participation literacy through repeated live interaction over time.
organizational labs
For teams and institutions
Experiential labs for observing how interaction shapes authority, participation, decision-making, and collaboration in real time.
why this matters
Power is not only structural.
It is continuously reproduced through ordinary interaction:
who responds
who explains
who absorbs tension
who disappears
These processes usually happen too quickly to perceive.
Relational Fieldwork creates environments where they can become visible and workable.
What participants notice over time
“This work has started to expand in me and in my relational field. I’ve noticed patterns repeating across different people and situations — with such similarity that I can’t help but see my own participation in creating the outcomes. There’s a kind of zoomed-out perspective now, like I’m in the interaction and also watching it unfold.”
-Kevin Karpinski
“We entered a space where things didn’t need to be fully formed, where we could delay our automatic responses and stay with what was happening. At times I didn’t understand what was happening. But I began to feel that not knowing didn’t mean I was lost.”
-Anita van Ast
About Laura
Laura Geiger is an artist, facilitator, and creator of participatory relational practices.
Her work draws from puppetry, applied theatre, somatics, performance, social practice art, and group process to create live environments where interaction can be slowed down, perceived, and worked with in real time.
Through projects including Deep Puppetry™ and Relational Fieldwork, she explores how participation shapes meaning, power, responsibility, and collective experience.