Landing Sessions by Shelley Etkin
A Body Journey to Places of Our Origin, Imagination and Present |
Landing sessions facilitate a journey into personal relationships with land through conversation and embodied imagination. One at a time, participants are invited to recall or invoke the lands that they come from, have moved through, or been shaped by. The practice guides each participant to drop into layers of sensing and speaking from within their field of perception. Information may arrive from this personal archive, the site where the practice is held, or from not-yet-known lands.
We are all from somewhere, often many places, and our sense of this situates our perspectives in the world. Humans have been dwelling on land, moving across land, and participating immensely in the conditions of land. Likewise, land informs our ways of being since early on — our thinking, our bodies, languages, and ways of interacting, just as our intersectional sociopolitical identities do.
Dynamics along race, class, and gender are intimately woven with how we treat land; whether in terms of access to natural resources and their exploitation, entanglements of colonialism and nationalism, histories of belonging or lack thereof, ancestral experiences, local knowledges, and currently lived questions of connection and disconnection from land. Intersectional solidarity amongst humans must be interwoven with these forms of care for more-than-humans and lands we live with. As a verb, ‘landing’ shifts away from addressing land as territory into participating in an ongoing process.
This moment of gathering invites us to attend to our shared yet diverse grounds; how can we be here together, in these bodies, in this place and time? To unravel these questions, landing sessions offer space to digest through the body, allowing each participant to find articulations that are unique to their experience. Through entering a subtle, relaxed, dream-like state, the imagination opens a space to process and access these topics through another point of entry. All bodies are welcome, the exchange is held in English, and part of the time is spent laying with eyes closed.
Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator and gardener with roots in the US and Israel. Her work centres relationships between bodies and lands, engaging in process-based ecological thinking, making and healing. She moves between dance, performance, curation, pedagogy and community organising, weaving practices of plant medicine, bodywork and place-based knowledges from a holistic perspective, expanding the body's perceptive capacity and sensitivity to communicate with the environment. Shelley works both as a solo artist and collaboratively in various environments, including »Ponderosa« - a rural artists' residence in Brandenburg, Germany, where she facilitates the »Garden as Studio« platform. She is currently a guest lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She collaborates regularly with Laura Burns as »LARK: Living Archive of Remembered Knowledges« as well as with Angela Schubot and Aune Kallinen and is part of the international »Hungry Mothers« collective and the local artists and curators association »neue häute«. She holds an M.A. in Ecology and Contemporary Performance (Finland) and a B.A. in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (USA).
Where: digital
When:
October 25th, 2020: 14:00-14:35, 14:45-15:20, 15:30-16:05, 17:00-17:35, 17:45-18:20, 18:30-19:05
November 7th, 2020: 14:10-14:45, 16:00-16:35, 16:45-17:20, 17:30-18:05
November 8th, 2020: 14:10-14:45, 14:55-15:30
