ACE R&D:
becoming creaturely
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"​When I first came up with the term ‘becoming creaturely’ I was thinking: Butoh and movement practices of becoming images instead of imitating them; hybrid and queer identities; shape-shifting; oppressive norms, and hierarchies of being that lead some of us to becoming ‘other’."
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​​What is becoming creaturely?
Becoming Creaturely is an experimental, emerging artivist project at the intersections of health, justice, and the grotesque. The practice approaches somatic resistance as inquiry, and the body as a political archive, situated within particular material environments. The collective engages social and ecological injustices to raise awareness of invisible violence, through the visual language of becoming creaturely, and micropolitical performances.
Where did becoming creaturely come from?
I first launched becoming creaturely as a concept with @qwcafe in September 2024, framed as an invitation to decenter the human by undermining hierarchies of being through eco-somatic movement and multispecies storytelling, in relationship with the ancient woodland of Queens Wood. I then invited Irene Fiordilino, and her creative practice at the time, experimenting with the architecture of her pregnant body - engaging the themes of metamorphosis, growth, death and decay - for a collaboration, and together we co-facilitated a workshop as a practice of collective care during uncertain times, in response to shifting political landscapes @chisenhaledance in February 2025.
Becoming Creaturely, as praxis, is the creative methodology I developed through my doctoral research in Visual Cultures, incorporating mad activist, ecofeminist, posthumanist, new materialist, and post-structural texts; and autoethnographic-embodied methods or embodied storytelling of ecological entanglements within the cauldron of polycrisis.
Where is becoming creaturely headed?
From September 2024 until September 2025 I researched and developed BC with the advice and mentorship of Director of Applied Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths College, Dr Molly McPhee, as well as artist and producer Cat Harrison, to plant the seed for a socially engaged performance-making project on invisible violence. ​I am deeply grateful for the support, guidance and allyship received during this delicate phase of the project.
This six-month R&D would enable me to make this step-change in my creative practive by developing the below solo sketches into participatory live performances serving as a site for healing, resistance, and transformative justice.
Where is home for you?​
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I embody a hybrid Maltese-British identity with settler Italian, Portuguese and English lineage in my blood lines. I hold complexity not only in cultural identity, but across gender expression, sexual orientation, class, and (dis)ability. As a Maltese born white European person, and postcolonial subjectivity, who received her primary care as a child from her maternal English grandmother nanna Imelda Bason, I occupy both the positions of coloniser and colonised. As a result, I have always felt like I've lived my life in exile, never fully belonging anywhere. This is the story of how I have found and made my home in London. The complexity in my heritage, together with my neurodivergence and queerness, leads me to primarily find a sense of belonging in divergent, queer, sub and countercultures.
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This spoken word piece engages themes of estrangement, displacement and dispossession. When embodying multiplicity can never rest in either one or the other, like a chameleon that shape-shifts according to its environment, it forever sits at the threshold of the both/and. This is an example of how I use the material entanglements in my lived experience to inform embodied storytelling that is polyvocal, attempting to articulate complexity and nuance, that is often overlooked by dominant narratives and oppressive norms.
This is an example of an anti-racist movement workshop I ran in partnership with Queens Wood Cafe and Woodland Retreat in Queens Wood, Haringey as a local micropolitical and embodied action in solidarity with refugees and folkx from migrant backgrounds - in response to the national far-right riots in the UK, August 2024.
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The eco-somatic movement workshop involved a physical exploration of the body as a decolonial tool, a concept I developed from Ben Spatz’s text ‘Blue Sky Body’, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s text ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’, and movement praxis research on ‘becoming indigenous to a land’.
I offered prompts, invitations and provocations I developed from my own practice encountering the wood as a movement partner, which participants used as entry points to play with, mould, resist or reject to follow their own sensations, impulses and desires as they unfolded. The event was open to all; no prior experience in somatic movement was required to participate. Following the movement exploration, we then shared lunch at Queen’s Wood Cafe.
This movement philosophy emerged from my doctoral practice research on the body as a decolonial tool focusing on 'becoming' and 'fostering relationality with the more-than-human' as a way of cultivating indigeneity. The movement experience offers embodied practice that seeks to undermine dominant discourses in global mental health, an understanding of indigeneity that focuses on the ‘here and now’. Through this movement philosophy, I seek to centre the experience of survivors, refugees and migrants who fled violence in their migration journeys, advocating for the right to forget and starting anew, as well as honouring lineage in decolonial discourses on embodiment.​
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a gold iron hanger:
Health Inequities on the Maltese Islands
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Filmed by Michael Forton​
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In this piece, I engage health inequities, and the structural violence toward women and girls, that persists on the Maltese Islands, where abortion continues to be illegal. I do this through the physical act of meditative walking, holding out an iron hanger, historically one of the ways women have used everyday objects to terminate unwanted pregnancies. The iron hanger also symbolically speaks to the ways women, on the islands and also globally, continue to be forced to have to find their own ways of accessing abortion illegally, often risking their lives or criminalisation in the process.
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I came to work with Highgate wood and Queens wood, partners and collaborators in my creative and ecosomatic practice - as a fugitive. I first sought refuge in the wood while navigating the complex terrain of displacement and estrangement, and then again when reliving gender-based invisible violence in domestic and everyday spaces. I investigated these experiences through movement, ritual and taboo cultural practices.
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Through these alchemical and transmutational ritual practices, I sought to forge intimacy with the more-than-human world, as I explored the material body of the wood as an extension of my own physical body. I did this by gathering and pouring menstrual blood, as part of chord cutting spell casting, and materially entangled root planting rituals. In this way, the embodied gestures become micropolitical acts, and potent sites for healing and justice.
This is an example of how I seek to create performances that are also anti-oppressive by engaging systemic injustices, through embodied storytelling, that is always entangled with the ecological. ​
Somatic resistance and social justice:
bitten bitten
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In southern Italy “pizzica pizzica” or “bitten bitten” is a traditional dance called the dance of the Tarantula. “Pizzica” is a Salentine version of the nationwide dance called Tarantella. The traditional dance form grew out of a myth where women were believed to become possessed after being bitten by a Tarantula, hence its commonly known name “The Dance of the Spider Women”. The ritual is traditionally associated with oppressed women who upon being bitten by the tarantula would start writhing on the ground and become increasingly delirious as they become infected with the poison. Accompanied by frenetic folk music, the afflicted women would eventually rise to stomp on the ground, convulse, dance wildly, chaotically and in circles for days, until the experience peaks and fades away.
This video is a solo outcome from engaging with one of six movement scores I composed for collective practice research of ecological entanglements, within the cauldron of polycrisis. This is one example of how I approach somatic resistance as inquiry, and the body as a political archive of our times. The concept for this piece threads the symbolism of the bitten women convulsing, with the guided imagery of a spider weaving a web, and the myth of hysteria in the history of women’s madness. The work builds on histories of collective action in critical mental health, marked by a resistance toward oppressive norms.
Thanks to the formative more-than-human encounters with a tickling spider on Hampstead Heath, and the moist damp body of Queens Wood, in the creation of this work.
Key texts:
“The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience” and “Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness” by psychologist and Foucauldian Jane Ussher, and her historical analysis of how power shapes knowledge about subjectivities, tracing the different ways feminised knowledges have been delegitimised across the ages - to the persecution of women as witches in Medieval Times; “Staying with the Trouble” by Donna Haraway, her String Figure theory and what she calls “sympoietic”, interdependent, and multispecies storytelling of “response-ability”, as a “collective knowing and doing”.
Music: Nine Inch Nails 3 Ghosts I
Becoming Creaturely: Act I, Queer Femmes
Shots from a micropolitical performance in production.
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This piece engages embodied storytelling of oppressive norms, the invisible violence of cisheteropatriarchy, and the ways in which gendered hierarchies of being fetishise non-normative, queer femmes. The material and situated storytelling draws from lived experiences in shared housing environments in London. This site-responsive performance speaks to the hidden history of Queens Wood as once a marginal site due to the folkx (and the creatures) known to inhabit it.
In this piece, we seek to create a liminal environment with the embodied actions and slow somatic movement of walking and crawling - to trouble power relations between human-environment, human-human, and human-animal. Using the plural body as medium, we toy with dominant ways of being in everyday spaces and invite you - our audience - to re-imagine with us other ways of becoming through the creaturely form of the hybrid ram.
Performed & co-devised by Fabienne Formosa and Lizzy Tan
Filmed by Michael Forton
Co-produced with becoming creaturely collective
Creative direction by Fabienne Formosa