How might an embodied understanding of ecological change grow agency from despondency? / Emma Lindsay (2021)

This project combines the influence of somatic movement practitioners, visual artists, meditation and mindfulness techniques to form a methodology which allows for phenomenological dialogues with a changing biosphere. With an emphasis on how varying environments might invite particular bodily responses, the project investigates how somatic methodologies not only allow the individual to, in the words of Donna Haraway ‘Stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016), but can provide a space that values individual subjective experience as highly as climate data. Within a collaborative group framework, we have explored the potential of somatic movement scores, embodied writing and site-sensitive movement to ground the individual in the midst of an interconnected environment and open up a dialogic response, as opposed to a didactic or disembodied comment. Throughout this document I will present the many creative outcomes that have emerged during this research process. Each outcome, whether visual, written or danced is an example of the many alternative ways of articulating or ‘languaging’ our responses to climate change and the shifting environments we exist within. This is a language which is closer to the body, a language as an unexplained upwelling, an immediate response to our kinaesthetic attuning to the world we exist in, an acknowledgement that we are animal. It is a slow, low-to-the-ground kind of language. It is cyclical, it wells up from our experience of the world and it moves through and beyond Eco-paralysis, towards hopefulness