Beyond Rhizome: The Routes We Take – Kandy was a two-day interdisciplinary gathering held on 25 and 26 July 2025at the Karaliya Convention Centre and Centre for Performing Arts, Kandy. More than a workshop or exhibition, Beyond Rhizome was conceived as an evolving space for artistic exploration, shared learning, and personal and collective transformation.
Rooted in the philosophy of Movement Rhizome, the event questioned conventional ways of learning, creating, and relating. Rather than positioning knowledge as something transmitted from one person to another, the gathering created opportunities for knowledge to emerge through encounter, movement, experimentation, conversation, observation, and shared experience.
The title “The Routes We Take” became both a theme and a way of thinking about the event. A route is rarely a straight line. It can change through encounters, interruptions, memories, bodies, places, and unexpected directions. In this sense, the routes explored during Beyond Rhizome were not simply physical pathways, but embodied, artistic, intellectual, and emotional journeys.
Across the two days, participants engaged with diverse forms of practice, including movement, sound, writing, visual expression, performance, discussion, and silence. These practices created spaces where participants could move beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines and explore what becomes possible when different forms of knowledge meet.
At the heart of the gathering was the idea that learning can happen through doing, sensing, listening, and being with others. The body was not treated merely as an instrument for artistic production, but as a site of knowledge. Experiences, memories, sensations, relationships, and environments became part of the learning process.
Beyond Rhizome also created a space for shared authorship. There was no single centre from which knowledge flowed. Instead, ideas travelled between people, practices, and experiences, forming temporary connections and new possibilities. In this sense, the event reflected the rhizomatic understanding of learning: multiple beginnings, multiple directions, and no predetermined endpoint.
The exhibition and presentations further extended this process by bringing artistic practices into dialogue with one another. Rather than presenting finished works as isolated outcomes, the event encouraged us to encounter artistic practice as an ongoing process of questioning, making, unmaking, and becoming.
Ultimately, Beyond Rhizome was not about arriving at a single destination. It was about recognising the routes that emerge when we move together.
It invited us to slow down, to listen differently, to encounter unfamiliar perspectives, and to remain open to transformation.
Beyond Rhizome continues beyond the event itself.
It lives in the relationships formed, the questions left unanswered, the practices carried forward, and the new routes that continue to emerge.
We moved. We listened. We created. We encountered. And together, we went Beyond Rhizome.
