Landing Together: Murmuration
Shelley Etkin
Sunday
14.30 - 16:00
SAB 1
Workshop
Landing is an ongoing process; we are landing and the land is landing all the time. As a shift away from the territory of nouns into a mode of living in verbs, landing embodies a continual movement. From this premise, we may enter into a sphere of communication through their shared capacity for imagination. This is a felt-sense practice in acknowledging land as our primary cultural context, to meet the complexity of presences within this land and the multiple lands within each body.
The session begins with a meditation to invoke one's relationship to land and the personal archive of places that have informed them to hone a specific question. With this, participants will be facilitated into a journey, laying on the ground with eyes closed and mouths moving. Eventually, a kind of dream-like state invites a group murmuration in which participants speak continually and simultaneously describing image, sensation, emotion, allowing language to emerge. Supported by open questions infused into the journey, participants are encouraged to sense and speak from their own perceptive experience. Journeys may meet, crossover, and diverge from one another.
No particular background is needed other than a willingness to listen and be heard this way.
Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and gardener based in Berlin, with roots in the U.S./Turtle Island and Israel/Palestine. Her work centres relations between bodies and lands, engaging in process-based ecological thinking, making, and healing. Moving between dance and somatics, curation, pedagogy and community organising she weaves practices of plant medicine, bodywork, and place-based knowledges.
Shelley works independently and collaboratively, in a range of environments including Ponderosa, a rural arts centre where she facilitates the Garden as Studio platform for artistic research. Shelley is also a guest lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin, facilitating a course expanding the understandings of urban gardens through transdisciplinary perspectives.
Shelley is in ongoing collaborations with Laura Burns as LARK: Living Archive of Re-membered Knowledges, with Angela Schubot in the Mossbelly project, with Jared Gradinger in research into regenerative thinking, and in longterm learning exchange with Aune Kallinen, among others. Shelley is a member of the multidisciplinary collectives Hungry Mothers and La Foresta.
Shelley holds an M.A. in Ecology and Contemporary Performance (Finland) and B.A. in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (USA) and a Permaculture Design Certificate through Earth Activist Training (USA).