…how might learning to think with our hands, rehearsing ideas with touch and activating our embodied mind offer methods for navigating critical times with care?…
We are living in a world where the ‘rational’, human brain runs the show - and mind is separated from body. Objective fact trumps subjective feeling - what we can measure is a truth, what we can sense is not and imagination is a ‘taboo’. However, what might be revealed to us if we tended to a problem with our hands? If we used touch to connect inner and outer worlds (or make new ones)? If we rehearsed intentions and ideas through material? If boundaries actually became slippery surfaces for sharing and caring?
Soft Tissue: Squishy Thinking + States Of Sensitive Being + Care-full-ness uses methods from art research to explore how tactile encounters, melty behaviours and boundaryless bodies can shape practices of kinship and care and form a part of our new toolkit for navigating precarious times. It started life as a research journal and evolved into the Squishy Sessions - a research cohort of other like-spirited artists, designers, dancers, coders, bodyworkers and cosy-curious that I convene each month to share practices and feel our way through uncertainty.
I was invited by Berlin’s School of Machines, Making and Make-believe to run a 5 week course on the back of the Soft Tissue content.
These methods are focused on:
De-prioritising the intellect and elevating the senses!
Using feeling, making, handling and gesturing practices to awaken knowledges inherent in our own bodies
Seeing what emerges when we ‘dialogue’ with different materials
Developing new codes and gestures for cultivating care-fullness - together
Actively seeking ways to re-sensitise ourselves
Conducting all of this with a lightness, warmth and humour!
Read more on the themes below or access the journal here:
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This focuses on touch as the unifying sense and its capacity to connect inner and outer worlds. We discuss what is revealed to us (and about us) when we make with our hands and how materials can be used to rehearse care-full gestures. We reanimate the vocabulary we use to talk about touch and build on it throughout the course.
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“Our mouths are shaped to speak the sounds of the gushing river, skin sensitised to the breeze.” - David Abram
We focus on sensory perception as a participatory act and how our bodies are shaped to bind us to the wider ecosystem. We re-enmesh with landscapes and using receptivity and creativity to orient in the world.
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The question ‘where does my body end and another begin’ is one of the most delicious to explore. With the lightest of probing, we begin to see ourselves expanding into space and dissolving seamlessly into surroundings. This theme is packed with bubbling, bodily, fizzing and fermenting as we explore bodily boundaries blurring, collapsing and coalescing. What might we achieve if we invite our bodies to slip into community? Our slippery skin or the permeable membrane could be figured as a site of caring and sharing. Materials could be exchanged to allow the Other to flourish. Our porosity could be an act as generosity.
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We explore the dimensions of our own bodies and use exercises to make contact and build new types of relationship with other bodies - human and non-human. Think perforated portraits, tactile storytelling and sympathetic touch.
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Who or what gives care in our ecology? (Spoiler - it’s not just humans!) We are surrounded by comforting, supporting, care-giving things. How do we assess caring as a practice - a behaviour that needs exercising, cultivating, attention and attending to. We explore ritual, ceremony and embodiment.
