meetings - past and forthcoming

a couple of opportunities to meet in person and online in April

dear friends and readers,
I hope life is treating you well these days.
As a friend wrote a few days ago, the opposite of war can also consist in keeping some small cultural practice alive, and this is what I’m trying to do at the moment. After I introduced es_ a couple of months ago, a few things have happened around it and I would like to share them with you.

Workshop at Radical Care conference

Last september I visited Workstorming, the 2021 conference organized by the MA Eco-Social Design at the Free University of Bolzano/Bozen (Italy): two days of talks, workshops and presentations trying to re-imagine how we work together.
The 2022 conference, Radical Care, is about to take place on 7-8 april in Schlanders, South Tyrol; I will be facilitating a workshop as part of the programme. The workshop is called Caring from our own bodies, and it will offer an embodied experience of interdependence and reciprocal care through somatic movement. More details will be available soon on the conference’s website. If you happen to be in South Tyrol around that time I will be happy to meet you there.

Foresta Collective’s Lifescapes Dojo: River

In spring 2021 I serendipitously encountered the work of Foresta Collective, a group “exploring potentials for living in more conscious, regenerative, and poetic ways” through an embodied, experiential approach. I decided to participate in the Summer trail of their Seasonal Academy, a collective learning space held by Sabina Enéa Téari and Egor Sviridenko, Foresta’s founders. Being part of this trail had an important role in the development of es_ in its current form; I’m grateful for the meetings, the impulses I received, and for the quality of the space-time we shared.

Alongside the Academy, they are now offering Lifescapes Dojo, a series of monthly online meetings around a lexicon they devised for this year. I will be a co-host of the fourth meeting, titled River, on April 16 at 17h CET. More information soon at the link above, or on Foresta Collective’s Instagram account.

Somatic meetings

During my research I discovered the work of several other somatic practitioners, dancers and designers who are active in design education in different countries: Claudia Broggi (Italy), Emma Hoette (The Netherlands), Daniela Monasterios-Tan (Singapore), Amanda Montanari (Italy-The Netherlands), Susan Sentler (UK), Emily Smith (Germany), Lotte van Gelder (The Netherlands). In February we managed to connect for an online meeting, which allowed us to have a first glimpse into each other’s practices and motivations: it was a beautiful and energizing, albeit short, space of exchange.

In the meantime I had the chance to meet Nicole Schumann-Sizaret (Portugal), and other meetings will happen in the next weeks. Getting to know what other people are doing to bring somatic/embodied/body-conscious approaches to design practice and education reassures me about the importance and potential of this work. If you are also working in this direction please do get in touch at es@es-se.it.

A book

Designing with the body is the book that summarizes Kristina Höök’s work with her research team at KTH Stockholm into the field of Somaesthetic Interaction Design. Even if my field of practice is Visual Design, I found Höök’s insights extremely relevant to my work and teaching. The book creates a solid theoretical frame for soma design “a process that reincorporates the body and movement into a design regime that has long privileged language and logic”, and draws on the author’s experience with somatic movement in design processes to show the different levels it can contribute to change how we practice and conceive design. Höök connects personal experience, philosophical thinking, political reflections on the body and much more.

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That’s all for this second issue. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on somatic design practices, so please do get in touch at es@es-se.it if you have comments, ideas or questions.
Thanks for reading!

Silvia

es_ design somatics was initiated by Silvia Sfligiotti. You can receive updates on the project through this newsletter and es_ design somatics’ instagram profile.