No one is born today with an ecological mindset, our habitat and culture do not allow it. The way we usually relate to the Earth is largely extractivist, consumerist, and anthropocentric. To develop ecological thinking we have to deconstruct our urban habits of thinking and acting, reimagining the relationship between humans and the environment from an ecosophical and interspecific perspective.

The project aims to “re-root our experience as complete human beings within the continuum of organic life” (Ingold) by experiencing the woods, learning to assume a more-than-human point of view, a terrestrial one.

The woods are complex ecosystems, places of transpiration and photosynthesis, and excellent habitats for biodiversity, where synergistic communities of plants, animals, fungi and bacteria live and constantly regenerate themselves, in relationships of exchange and mutual inclusion. By exploring such a habitat we can experience the wild intertwining of the different life forms that populate it, and come into contact with the slow and profound forces that keep us alive, perceiving the ecological connections with the nature (natural processes) of which we are a part.

Entering a wood also offers the opportunity to experience a not urban context we are not familiar with. Woods are inhospitable habitats for humans, more suitable for animals that live in humid soils and in the dark. They are places where, in order to move, we have to make room through the uncultivated and unruly vegetation, places where we aren’t constantly able to keep a standing position or sit comfortably, where we can easily lose our balance and orientation, our sense of time and space. Places where our ideas, as well as our bodies, might have to change posture in order to be able to stand. Indeed, we are no longer used to walking on non-flat, non-horizontal, non-paved surfaces. We are living in a smooth, clean, comfortable, thornless, bugless world, without any friction. In the woods we must relearn how to move, and how to think.

Finally, the woods are also an expression of the age-long relationship between human beings and these environments, sources of food, energy, refuge, and of philosophical, political, and poetic inspiration.

The participants will involved in a multi-day immersive experience, through collective-connective practices of walking, exploration, and immersion, aimed at stimulating aesthetic dialogues with-the woods and new postures of the body and mind. We will experience practices of relationship and listening, movement and staying, experimenting the friction, to familiarize, settle in, find our own dimension of crossing and connection. The approach will be sensorial-performative and driven to its very essence, abandoning our spoken languages to discover a new one.

Info in Italian!