"HUMAN-NATURE CONNECT"
Artist and Ecosomatic Residency 4-6 Nov 2022
Yorkshire Dales National Park (North of England, UK)
ORGANISED BY INTERCULTURAL ROOTS, MOVE TO CHANGE AND QUIET NOTE
This is a fully funded 3-day artist and eco-somatic residency in the Yorkshire Dales National Park with the participation of 30 embodied arts practitioners. Artists will be filmed being with their practice in site-specific chorus with and within the beautiful hills, limestone pavements and caves near to Ingleton with full board accommodation, local transport and specialist support provided. For the full Call for Artists: https://www.interculturalroots.org/project/human-nature-connect.
RAFFAELE RUFO’S SUCCESSFUL APPLICATION:
Share with us a short and concise one paragraph description of your artistic, creative or somatic practice and relevant experience including one or two links that exemplify your work if available.
After co-organising "Paths for Returning Home" with IR in May 2021, co-conducted with Thiago Gambogi (UK/BR), Nathalie Mann (FR) and Valentina Vitolo (IT), I moved to the State Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast where I have continued to work, individually and with groups, through movement, dance and performance, on the perceptual reciprocity between body and earth. My work aims to recognise and destabilise the consequences of (post)colonial/capitalist/extractivist practices of ecosocial destruction and individual alienation by revaluing the interpenetration of urban and natural environments and by addressing our collective inability to mourn the grief of disconnection and biodiversity loss. I am co-editing the special issue of JER on "Ecologies of Embodiment", I have recently presented a lecture+workshop at "(Re)Gaining Ecological Futures” (Floating University Berlin) and published an essay on "Sensing with Trees" with Venti Journal. I am guiding a research group on eco-somatics on the coast of Rome (https://vimeo.com/showcase/9632920). Find out more on https://www.raffaelerufo.com/ecosomatics.
Why would you like to be considered as a resident artist with Human-Nature Connect?
This residency is a great opportunity for working alongside 29 other artists from different embodiment/embodied practices and sharing visions, techniques and connections for nurturing and positioning my practice-research in a larger and richer field and for developing and documenting old and new aspects of my work in a supportive environment. Italy at the moment does not offer such opportunities and building an international network could be a first step towards filling this gap. Indeed, I am currently trying to develop an international eco-somatic artistic research project which aims to map and weave together places, people, practices and performances across Rome (with Delta del Tevere digital open air museum), Berlin (with Floating University) and Melbourne (with RMIT university). This residency could open up new pathways for a partnership also with IR.
Do you have any additional comments or observations you'd like to make?
In the spirit of collaboration and co-evolution, I would like to ask if you already have some ideas on the possible repercussions of the residency: a performance, a workshop or another type of event, a shared publication, something that can help develop the work further, help develop the connections with land and other artists, an installation of the work in which the artists can share their voices?
Journal of the Residency
Day 1 Friday 4 November
Morning walk in Ingleton.
The ancient romans conquered this land to take control of the river ...
Meeting at the Cafe before residency, conversations on the couch :
Finding the rhythms in nature
What does the tree get from the experience ? i I don't know: go and ask the tree / focus on the perspective of the tree. We underestimate the reciprocity with trees in the breathing cycles: we breath so that the breath can grow and transform light and carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugar (matter wood)
Until we recognize the different temporalities with trees we cannot get the reciprocity with trees and non humans
Susanne Simard : forest ecology the reciprocity between different species is what makes life and evolution possible - finding the mother tree
Writing group every time there is a full moon - allows you to see how the cycles happens inside of you
The lodge and the ‘gifting’
I am in the field practice of dance and ...'the somatic languaging of dance’
What are the words that need to be spoken before the words get spoken (the forests as art portals)
Holding hands in one big circle: the person sharing the process does not close the circle and then starts to walk carrying the others along in concentric circles becoming a spiral
Two words : becoming and borrowing : we are in a circle and we start with a movement that is our becoming now , then we see where it goes and then we borrow from the others movement into our own
Notice animals and plants allies in your life (after finding a comfortable position) i imagine a TIGER behind
7:30-9:30pm excursion out in the dark:
We are standing on hundred of meters of limestone terrace (a large cave) that has been forming in the last 13,000 years during the last ice age
Listen to the rhythms of these two sounds : the water of the river and the breeze of the wind as we stand with feet together and let the body oscillate following these rhythms
i see humans grazing in the night field
Come può una pratica di contaminazione (ecosomatica) diventare una forma di radicamento culturale?
How the place looks like in the day:
Day 2 SATURDAY 5 November
8:30-9 morning warm up: open to everybody making a 1-2 min offer of a movement / sound / gesture solo in couples or group ...
9:30-12:30 Hill walk - over the valley guided excursion
Walking up through grass and stones hearing g stories of this landscape shaped by humans and sheep farming noticing fissles and the solitary rowing tree standing out in the distance (aspens oaks and howthorns are the indigenous trees of thus land but the forest has disappeared)
Morphic dance with a rowan tree - the poetry of ancestrality - il sorbo, ecosomatic movement practice and then visual footage and then audio recording.
Last intuition on why shaping into the body of this tree matters also ethically and politically not only sensoriali and aesthetically : “Human have shaped this landscape making it what it looks like now ... trees have been nearly erased by mining farming and other human activities since the last ice age ... and now in sign of respect and grieving for the losses of trees and the anthropomorphic shaping that has been going on a human being takes the time to be shaped by this tree as a reciprocation. Shaping as a war of grieving for the loss of this forest. How can this solitary tree stand here in this full vulnerability to the weather to humans, so naked ? it takes a lot of strength to be vulnerable .. but perhaps the tree is not alone it is connected with what happens underneath and above ...
The sudden far view of a solitary boulder: what the hell are you doing here ? Touching and shaping my body again (a body without the head / finding archetypes of people with nature)
Sheeps, rocks and stonewalls
How can these solitary trees survive in these conditions taking roots under these vertical stones and sharing their destiny with them ?
Starting and ending with the circle of mushrooms
2-5pm cave walk / cavers
‘Bright Green Lies’, Derik Jensen, on Vimeo
The sponge moss and all trees here were cut in the bronze age
Into the cave : caving experience - the wettest i got in ages
Evening reflecting practice
feedback in 5 groups spoken and with some practice - open format
Inspiration: as breathing in as eating food
Being in the darkness of the cave without being able to see
Connections among us is in what happens underneath when we are in our internal practice
We have experienced many portals onto other worlds : cracks into world, the caves / each with his practice but together at the same time
Desolving of .. the ego ? like the limestone desolves through water
How much vulnerability we find in nature the solitary tree up the hills, the solitary boulders scattered up the hills, the limestone desolving with the water ... how can they cope with it? perhaps because they are not alone perhaps because the strength comes from the connection with life beneath and above
Words coming to the brain as pictures and titles connecting with other peoples practices
How we are connecting to the nature depends also on how we are connecting as a community with a long preparation
Human and nature separate or being the same? address the question with being still in the space
Presenting something in contrast with the space to open up possibilities to see it more clearly
What is impact ? Love into cities or bring people into nature ?
What will the impact of this be? Connection with everybody here listening to different perspective has been the most important thing
Trying to see the world from the perspective of a sheep trying to be the sheep / shift the focus
What we thought we might do we did not : the landscape was just bigger than what we thought wr could explore - being in the landscape became the practice rather than trying with being
Occupation of the land : the amount of people that inhabit the land
Human settlement : finding a center in the landscape : creating a city as a center in the landscape (settling in the tree , we found a tree to settle)
What is happening in the amazon has been happening here in the yorkshire hundred of years ago
The in and the out : the forest in the city and the forest in the city : here we are practicing the forest being here coexisting ... an ecology of practice that is in resonance with nature (we can expand the experience in between rather than being colonizing)
We are part of the universe we cannot remove ourselves ... how can we facilitate human consciousness . this forest that is happening here is the work of the universe
We lost the knowledge of how to relate with the forest / can you stop walking around the muddy path otherwise it will get worse this is the path people have been walking for a long time
To do the mantras activate possibilities in ways that it would take a lot of difficulties to do (words that create pictures, repetition, chanting)
Open performance
Raffaele and Lizzy : fearless intimacy without sexual desire (the dance, the touch, the eros)
May be the Yorkshire Dales wetness and water helped us find more fluidity in the body body fluids and fluid movements
“Feel it, feel it where the f#c# your want to feel it”
Day 3 SUNDAY 6 November
8:30 Morning warm up
Feel your inner spagnum (moss)
9:30 Trip to the kincave
Connective practice :'the song of the organs ( connect organs to elements to seasons and sounds : winter the water organ kidneys and bladder lower back - sccccnsound; then spring uuunsound earthy liver and bladder... then up to the heart summer aahhh sound ... and the autumn longs air organs sssss sound
What moves you to move to the cave ..: find the physical action
Can i become a crack between the dualisms of the world ?
(Re-)embodying my ancestral sounds Into the cave
The cave waterfall
Dancing whistling and singing the pizzica of san vito as i walk through the pebble stones across the stream of water crossing the cave
climbing up to meet the mossy roots and lower branches of this wonderful tree just outside the cave
1:30pm planting ceremony
Traveling on the bus talking with …
Ecosomatic work: build the mud bricks from Sardinia, healing rituals for psychosis people, 2 week residency Cagliari
Flying low technique spontaneous composition technique , improvisational technique , spiral philosophy going up and down - david zembrano (waiting and partnering technique)
Sentient performativities studies symposium - Nita Little
kirsty simpson contact improv uk
In the field where the planting takes places
In circle we prepare for seeding
Embodying the 4 attitudes of the seed: renounce surrender solitude patience
The owner of the land speaks: oaks cherries and silver birch native trees : hi friend looks after the land and protect it in its own way , if only temporarily ( seeds stay in the ground for hundreds of years until they know when it is time to grow ) ... a bag full of acorns - establish the oak tree near an hedgerows given it its life by a bird flying the acorns there - having so much strength that it can distribute - the oak tree, a capricorn (example of an oak tree and a rowen sharing the roots space literally)
Gifting is neither giving or receiving it is connecting
Joyce kilmer a tree poem
Acorns need a period of ibernation and in march they will grow
Planting takes to a wood in 15 years
Slingshot planting -'oaks fionda
Nature trail
3:30pm the return trip begins
Traveling by train with a residency companion, a visual artists who wants to understand what somatics is
For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2022, ‘Human-Nature Connect Ingleton 2022: Journal of the Residency, https://www.raffaelerufo.com/ecosomatics/human-nature-connect-2022