I have created my own ecosomatic approach to unearth situated embodied knowledges responding to the polycrisis of our times. The polyvocal embodied storytelling practices I devise focus on tracing the interplay between environments and inner landscapes, as well as cultivating a space for self-reflexivity and collective care. The approach seeks to counter alienation and the affects of neoliberalism in contemporary times. The critical and anti-oppresive frameworks informing the poetic scripts and creative prompts I write focus on drawing the entanglements between the personal and the political in everyday experiences.
Critical mental health, posthumanist, new materialist and ecofeminist studies conceptually frame the movement scores holding propositions and invitations for embodied actions as ways to decentre anthropocentric views of the human, undermining hierarchies of being and troubling power relations. This praxis proposes exploratory and playful ways of unearthing ecologically entangled storytelling by approaching the body as a poltical archive. The poetic scripts and embodied scores I compose seek to tease articulations of the materially entangled self through myth and imagery interweaving the landscape of the mind, and tracings of subtle physical sensations through gesture, impulse, mark-making, creative writing and the spoken word.
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I take an experimental approach when composing the creative material, one that I have developed through my own transdisciplinary background across mental health, activism, arts and academia. The creative material generated is site-sensitive and shaped through a desire to respond to some of the urgent crises of our times. In my own embodied practice, I cultivate relationality with the more-than-human by meeting companion species as teachers, through durational deep listening practices, slow-somatic movement, dreaming and encountering the land as partner in the form of subtle bodily sensations. The prompts and invitations I use to facilitate guided movement are often co-developed in partnerships with creatures, landscapes, elements and animate objects.
The global coronavirus pandemic pushed many of us to inhabit the outdoors in novel ways. When I first turned to the uneven land in Queens Wood as a movement partner, I did so because I had nowhere else to move during the lockdowns. Solo moving in public spaces was a new development for me at the time, one that evolved in response to the conditions imposed by the global health crisis.
This movement philosophy of moving with the land as partner and the ecological entanglements in times of polycrisis is central to my embodied storytelling approach. It entails meeting somatic resistance and obstacles with curiosity, as knots to be untangled.
However, I take a politicised approach to somatic work, building on adrienne maree brown’s justice model for somatics. Her social and environmental justice somatic work primarily centres Black liberation. This orientation significantly differs from the aims of somatic movement education within a wellbeing context based on a neoliberal model.
This praxis finds an affinity with Buddhist teachings and body-mind practices that guide us to meet the suffering of the world in healing work instead of turning away from it. It is not clean and shiny it came from the mud, the dirt, the discomfort and suffering experienced by bodies and minds in times of crisis.
The work centres indigenous cosmologies and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of becoming indigenous in her book 'Braiding Sweetgrass', her writings on the ethics of reciprocity and care, and Skywoman, an immigrant who is a part of the origin myth of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, or North America.
It is intended as a radical act of resistant anti-racist joy.
As a liberatory response to repressive, oppressive, and dominating forms of power.
Kimmerer insists that this is very difficult work for non-indigenous folk and settlers to do in an ethical way, and in my project, I actively engage with the trouble of working with indigenous cosmologies as a Maltese practitioner with settler lineage. However, the reframing urgently needed to respond to the polycrisis of our times depends on decentring the human and recentring indigenous cosmologies, Global Majority Heritage and divergent voices. Hence why I frame my work in terms of Donna Haraway’s materialist critical ecological methodology that invites us to look for the entanglements, and to develop capacities to respond creatively within our situated positions - what she refers to as “response-ability”- as ways of living and dying on a damaged planet, in her book “Staying with the Trouble”.
This also involves us, as a human species, to stay with the trouble and to meet the suffering that comes from the realisation that extractive approaches to the environment and treating nature as a commodity to be exploited, driving ecological degradation and social inequalities are also built on histories of white supremacy, settler colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy and sanism.
When depoliticised ecosomatics starts appropriating indigenous cosmologies and trying to by-pass this active ‘decentring’ and undoing urgently needed for building sustainable futures, like fascist yoga, to use Stewart Home’s term, ecosomatics runs the risk of becoming fascist.
This research outcome and discovery of moving with the land as partner cannot be disentangled from the indigenous cosmologies, and the marginal voices that conducted the movement inquiry. Doing so would perpetuate the same epistemic violence and extractive ideologies that historically erased marginalised voices - the very same invisible violence that we - as a collective - are meant to be undoing in justice and healing work.