How can we re-articulate our perception of the environments to unlearn with them in order to string nurturing relations?

conceptual framework

Our proposal is to thicken this space of transition through embodied exercises with sand, so that different ideas and relations can emerge. 

“ENVIRONMENTS” in this question means all human / (non)human - organic / (an)organic - living / (non)living, which surrounds us, stay in conversation with us and affect how we think about and with the world. We stay, slow down, focus and root with them in local and global scale, which intertwine. 

“TO BE ABLE TO UNLEARN WITH THEM AND STRING NURTURING RELATIONS” with these words we mean creating small, sustained shifts in how we attend to sand and other environments – shifts that might change our everyday gestures, our language, and eventually our politics - with which we co-learn/co-research.

Through performance research, deep listening, focused sensory exercises, site-specific/site-responsive work, structured improvisations and intermedia collaborations, we experiment with micro-shifts between sensation, emotion and idea. These small shifts aim to re-articulate our perception of the environments so we can unlearn with them in order to string more nurturing relations.

I. JUSTICE

In this research we respond to the problem of how climate catastrophe, rooted in extractive and human centric logics, numbs our capacity to care for and feel with our environments. Evolving climate catastrophe leaves us with embodied climate grief which is, however, often disavowed. This state, our habitual ways of sensing, naming, and narrating, isolates us from the more-than-human world and empowers disconnection consequently sustaining climate injustice. We find ourselves at distance instead of in relation. Therefore we ask, how these inherited perceptual structures block climate justice and equal, nurturing relations with human and more-than-human environments, in order to find alternatives. Our research project approaches climate justice through micro-practices of perception. By working with sand as a global collaborator we ask how staying with grief and slow unlearning of nature-culture bias can shift the ways we sense and relate to our environments. We yearn for climate joy.

II. TO STAY, TO SLOW DOWN, TO FOCUS, TO ROOT.

We propose an embodied, practice-as-research response to our urgency: How can we re-articulate our perception of the environments to unlearn with them in order to string nurturing relations? 

“HOW CAN” We consider these first two words as crucial part of our question which guides the nature of our practice as they suggest agency and possibility of multiple choices. They stress the urgency of awareness and our ability to act on or to unlearn our habitual perception-understanding-being in the world. By asking “how can,” we frame our project as practice-as-research: we test ways of re-articulating perception through embodied exercises, rather than seeking a single fixed answer.

“WE” in our question is always situated and unequal. In this project, “we” refers to those who have the resources and time to do this research, and we remain aware that climate (in)justice affects bodies differently across race, class, and geography.

“RE-ARTICULATE OUR PERCEPTION” as human species we dwell and rely on words. To articulate means to clearly express ideas. There is a possibility to work with sensed information and influence what kind of idea/thought comes out of this process. How can we unlearn what hides in this liminal space - the normative patterns that usually govern this transition – the automatic, humancentric interpretations that close down other meanings.  “Re-” therefore stands for repetition of attempts to think and relate otherwise than we were thought to. In the diagram below, we map the flow from sensation to emotion to idea, highlighting a liminal space where a shift can occur. 

III. GLOCAL - TO LOOK, TO SENSE, TO ACT.

We slow down with a specific glocal (global entity which is otherly local and co-creates the environments in which and with which we unlearn and try to sustain for still possible futures), sand, and treat them as a collaborator rather than a backdrop. We percieve sand as an entity who tell stories and carries knowledge on different spatio-temporal scales and therefore leaves a lot of space for shift, which we try to activate. They materialise deep time, extraction, and mobility. By attending to their textures, quantities, and movements, we can encounter climate catastrophe and climate justice at multiple scales – from a grain on our skin to global infrastructures of construction and erosion.

Our methodology is practice-as-research. We generate knowledge through repeated, documented encounters between our bodies and sand. These encounters are both individual (embodied research) and collective (performance research with Romana and Eve).

1. EMBODIED RESEARCH - TO LOOK FOR SANDHOOD WITHIN US

Mainly during our own explorations through techniques of:

DEEP LISTENING (with contact and directional microphones and our own ears)

DEEP FOCUS (meditation, standing exercises, explorations with a microscope, re-drawing sites and grains of sand)

2. PERFORMANCE RESEARCH - TO MOVE AND BE WITH THE SAND

We work with a dancer, Romana Klementis, and a singer, Eve Rhodes. Our bodies undergo various exercises (drawing, movement, vocalization, writing) in various locations (on site (beach, dunes), in controlled environment (black box, studio space, theatre)), which nurtures our embodied knowledge of sand/embodied knowledge of the environment with which we aim to unlearn. 

We treat our own bodies as research instruments, using self-reflexive attention to track how sensation, emotion, and perception shift through these practices.

To summarize, we work in three stages:

1. Individual embodied exploration which aims to develop a vocabulary of sensations and micro-shifts in perception.

2. Shared performance research

3. Documentation and Scenographic outcomes

Through this looping process we test how re-articulating sensation and emotion in relation to sand can shift our perception of the environment and help us unlearn inherited, human-centric structures.

IV. INSPIRATION.

Donna Haraway - Staying with the trouble, “SF”, Tim Ingold - Art of inquiry, Study as attention, Doing undergoing, Karen Barad - Intra-action, Lukáš Likavčan - Earth, Planet, Globe

From Haraway and Barad we take seriously the idea that humans and sand are already entangled; there is no outside observer. From Ingold and Likavčan we take methods of attention and scalar thinking that help us read sand as both local material and planetary actor.

Manuela Infante - Planthood, Meredith Monk - vocal work, Justin Bennett - A Heap of Stones, Zoya Shojaee Sardashti - workshops, Milan Adamčiak - visual scores

Manuela Infante and Meredith Monk offer dramaturgies of voice and more-than-human presence. Justin Bennett and Milan Adamčiak inspire our approach to visual scores and sound-objects. Zoya Shojaee Sardashti’s workshops inform our use of autoethnographic and civic performance methods that connect personal experience with structural questions of justice.

Together, these theoretical and artistic references frame our project as a queer, anti-capitalist, practice-as-research exploration of climate justice through glocal, embodied relations with sand.