Siegmar Zacharias
Listening towards a Social Body. Practicing Cultural Somatics
Online block seminar (with analog elements), English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Saturdays, 4 dates: 8.1., 15.1., 22.1., 5.2.2022, 10-18 h

How are our body / minds marked by cultural experiences? What are practices of collective adaptability, healing and regeneration? We will start with the bodies in the “room”.

This workshop/seminar proposes to collectively share a somacoustic listening practice as an embodied starting point to unpack questions of cultural somatic like embodied trauma, collective grief, processes of cultural dissociation, orientation, adaptability, relating. Cultural somatics is assuming a nervous system of a collective body that renders systemic problems as dissociative survival strategies. We will read Alexis Pauline GumbsUndrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals through the lens of cultural somatics. We will engage with artistic practices towards regeneration and healing. Participants will be invited to develop their own daily practice as an emergent strategy.

Literature:
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Emergent Strategy), AK Press 2020.
Introduction to the field of cultural somatics: Menakem Resmaa (2017). My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Tada Hozumi: https://tadahozumi.com/category/cultural-nervous-system-theory/.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: reading intro to cultural somatic reader; presentation of ones own developed daily practice; active participation in group work.

Siegmar Zacharias (RO/D) is a performance artist, philosopher and death doula. Her works develop formats of performances, immersive installations, discursive encounters that address questions of generative ethical dynamics of transformation: ecologies of artistic and political-social practice, agency. She works with people and uncontrollable material such as smoke, mucus, the nervous system. Recent works are: WAVES-somacoustic listening sessions, SLIMEDYNAMICS, Drooling Lecture. Under the titleTraining for political imagination, she has been developing 24-hour immersive projects with researchers*, artists* activists* : The Other Thing, Intimacy with Death, Posthuman Solidarities, ANIMAterialities - The Future of Grief. She is a regular guest lecturer and mentor at Stockholm University of the Arts, HZT Berlin, DAS Amsterdam.