Artistic Research & Workshop (2023)

I wear the earth, the earth wears me.

This is the first in a workshop series started in Blanca, Spain during ROTA Festival, December 2023. Naturopathic Somaesthetics is an exploration in tactile knowledge; it generates a bodily conversation with earth. It is a place-based practice; in its first iteration, we got to know the southern Spanish landscape through the surface of our skins. Leading this workshop on a sunny morning, we asked our participants to fashion foraged organics onto their bodies, and to fashion their bodies onto the earth. It could be as simple as lying down in tall grass, or squeezing a pinecone. As they adorned themselves, we asked practitioners to pay attention to texture, temperature, pressure, movement, sound, and smell. 

‘Naturopathic’ alludes to well-being conjured from natural substances. ‘Somaesthetics’ is embodied aesthetic experience; it flips the hierarchy that privileges verbal, narrative experience, and instead centers knowledges that cannot be conveyed in words. We pair these concepts with the practice of automatic fashioning, which, much like automatic writing, channels stream of consciousness; it is an intuitive process of getting dressed. The resulting methodology uses a locavore palette and can be transposed into any region and biome. The learning objective is a heightened empathy for Earth that incites environmental activism. More acutely, we seek the body's knowledge of place beyond verbal description, repositioning the ‘second body’ (earth) as the ‘first home’ (clothing). Somaesthetics can be described – such as the tickling pressure of one’s forearms in the pink peppercorn tree’s viney branches, or the sound and texture of inserting an entire hand into a massive aloe steak – but they must be felt to be truly known.

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¹Kimmerer, Robin Wall. The Democracy of Species. Green Ideas 10. London: Penguin Books, 2021. 40.
²Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Perverse Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 31.