Oct 26: Artistic Practice Session #2: Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness

Oct 26, 2022

Facing the magnitude of the task of enabling a world without violent and unsustainable relations requires more than a change of values, narratives, convictions or protocols: it requires an interruption of conscious and unconscious harmful desires hidden behind promises of entitlements and securities that people hold on to, particularly when they are afraid of pain, loss, scarcity and belittlement.

– Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective

How can arts practices help us move through complexities, uncertainties, paradoxes, frustrations, fears and failures that are part and parcel of social and environmental justice work? Can they enable us to practice healthier possibilities of (co)existence that are viable, but are unthinkable/unimaginable within our dominant frames of reference?

Radical Tenderness is a landscape of critical thought and embodied art-life exercises that attempts to activate a political practice of healing based on reconfiguring the connections between reason, affect and relationality. Working for over a decade with Radical Tenderness as a political-affective mode of re-existence within the context of performance art/practice as a pedagogical process of un/re-learning, Dani has been interrogating and exploring ways in which we can create and nurture ways of being that face – and attempt to interrupt – different forms of violence inherent in our construction as modern subjects. This practice explores the co-production of critical knowledge, political imagination and relational stamina through languages that go beyond rational and discursive realms. Using the body as its primal source and connector, it explores our ability to perceive and relate through multiple senses and modes of knowing, inhabiting the contradictions, incoherences and vulnerabilities that arise in the process of daring to live through and beyond identity, anthropocentrism and separability, working with tension and trust by attempting to increase care in proportion to risk.

This session will explore exercises Dani has created in collaboration with the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, which she has been a part of since 2017.  It will be inspired by their text “Co-sensing with Radical tenderness” and will be anchored in the body in an expansive sense, which includes its physical, cultural and metabolic manifestations. 

We recommend participants come with comfortable clothing and a willingness to meet their own assumptions and resistance as teachers in this process of (un)learning. No previous physical training is necessary. 

This workshop is part of a series of 6 Artistic Practice Immersion Sessions for nurturing intellectual and relational stamina in the context of the Climate and Nature Emergency.

Space is limited to 20 participants, registration is required.