27 November 20

Dropping Out – conversation #01

07 November 2020

Themes

Health, bodies, communities, expression, trauma, stress, somatics.

Tentacles of inquiry

Reflecting on first hand experience of Long COVID. Bodies go wrong because we’re human. Realities of body and brain exhaustion. Current situation means people are enduring more and more stress. Dropping out as a way to cope? 
Connecting with international communities in the absence of an answer from pharmaceutical medicine.  We are self-organising forming on-line long covid supports, sharing herbal remedies and recipes to for wellness. Attempting to find pleasure in nourishment.

Screengrab showing a woman with brown long hair in a room filled with plants, she is holding a plant in her hands, talking about it on a skype call.

Experience of pain and the pervasive desire to escape my body. Also the challenges of communicating and expressing myself through words, especially when spoken. Is language failing us? Simultaneously excavating and building, thinking about layers, what’s buried beneath the surface? What’s concealed? What can we share?
 I have started testing abbreviated writing methods as a way to express thoughts and ideas honestly in the moment.

Strip of paper with the words "you seem to forget that I'm only human" hand drawn text. The strip of paper is stuck to a wall overlooking Portsmouth waterfront.

This time of collective embodied trauma, healing, somatics. Searching for strategies and coping mechanisms. Can we be open to the possibilities of dropping out? To opportunistically shift mindsets, rhythms, routines? Yet the uneven societal reality, is dropping out only available for the privileged? Emerging form of shared consciousness, through resonating collective feelings/experiences and coping resources. What about the spiritual? World view of panpsychism that the universe is alive and all things embody consciousness. Is it possible to be a gentle radical?

Photo of a lap top during the Skype call, the screen is blue and written in white text is the questions: "Can I embrace the apocalypse? Isn't chaoos and complexity more realistic?

Leap-frogging resources
• Everything Is Connected, Billboard artwork by Saif Osmani
• Chapter from Pleasure Activism The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
• The Prisoner’s Apothecary, a mobile healing unit “Plantbulance” that transforms the plants from The Solitary Gardens into medicine for communities most deeply impacted by the insidious reach of mass incarceration.
• Huckmag
• In-conversation: Reimagining Futures and Creative Practice with Selina Thompson and Ama Josephine Budge by Season for Change
• Kai Syng Tan on Artful Leadership with Dr Michael Pinchbeck as part of Bunker Talks
• The Memory Field Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time, Memory, and Land by Jake Skeets
• Energizing Change: In conversation with Charlene Carruthers and adrienne maree brown via Chicago Humanities Festival

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GG

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26 November 20

Dropping Out – Strategy for collective research

 

Throughout our sessions we will each bring something to share, be it observations, experiences or emerging strategies. These share’s will connect to the previous session, forming leap-frog flows of playful movement, allowing the conversations to evolve and expand our inquiries like tentacle limbs. We want to remember this process and continue building upon it with the aim of creating change, in ourselves, our individual practice’s and our shared collective practice and beyond.

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GG

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