2019 - 2021

Amazonizing Practices: processes of thinking-moving with a landscape

> practice-as-research

The research project Amazonizing Practices: processes of thinking-moving with a landscape was undertaken in the frame of the Master Performance Practices programme at ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem, The Netherlands. This research creates an interface between choreography, Amazonian studies and philosophy. It started from the urgency to consider and learn from ways of knowing and being-becoming in the world that have been invalidated by colonial processes, and from the recognition of crossroads between Indigenous and posthuman philosophies regarding interdependencies between humans and extrahumans. I propose an approximation to a possible Amazonian landscape as a decolonial practice, drawing from the works of Argentinian semiotician Walter D. Mignolo and Brazilian historian Luiz Antonio Simas. Thinking with British anthropologist Tim Ingold and Simas, I view landscapes as practiced spaces, as meshworks of material, geopolitical, affective, cultural and mythic dimensions.

Since I had the opportunity to work in the Brazilian Amazon in the context of an artistic residency during the fall 2020, the latest research phase focused on the aforementioned contextual background through the materiality of lived experience. The aim has been to develop the meshwork of artistic practices which constitute the main research methods. These include choreographing human and extrahuman bodies, healing, thing-making, divination, speaking and writing, and can be shared through different performance formats.

Thinking with philosopher Isabelle Stengers, I adopt the notions of re-enchantment and magic as tools for connecting human and extrahuman; tools for creating artworks which may open spaces for embodiment, imagination, togetherness and otherness. The Amazonizing Practices propose the reactivation of animistic dimensions of experience as a strategy for Bodies and landscapes to transform and be transformed, raising awareness regarding the urgency of collaboration between different epistemes; and suggesting the encounter between the ancestral and the posthuman as the crossroad where we can imagine sustainable ways of future life.