Bodies of
Cultures
Communities
& Places
BERLIN
19
20
21
NOVEMBER
2021
BODY IQ 2021 celebrates Bodies of Cultures, Communities & Places
BODY IQ Festival 2021 aims to address questions of embodied recovery & revisioning in the context of global ethical, social & ecological crises and change. Somatic practices have moved beyond a field of sensorial, experiential and emancipatory learning into wider educational, therapeutic, artistic and social-justice contexts.
BODY IQ Festival recognises the urgent need for meaningful re-embodiment of increasingly digitalised cultural communities in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.
BODY IQ Festival 2021 offers a forum for practice exchange, practice-theory dialogue, debate, experiment, networking, application and articulation of potential for somatic-activisms beyond the field into a diverse range of cultural and social environments. The three-day festival offers workshops, talks, panel-discussions and performances with international presenters. The festival will offer live and online participation and modes of communication in line with codes of safer practice.
• somatic research
• somatic culture & arts
• somatic activism
• somatic community
// How do we articulate somatic-informed practices as sensitive tools for social and political transformation?
// How do we address hidden and embodied ideologies, modes of exclusion, oppression and privilege within our growing field?
// How do we take responsibility for mobilising, activating and organising meaningful ethical embodied interaction in a rapidly changing world?
// How do we move beyond a historically inscribed ‘whiteness’ of the field towards a making space for global-majority bodies of culture?
// How can somatic practices contribute toward a re-embodiment of attention and sustainable human interaction with a living world?
BodyIQ 2021 includes Topics
// Critical Somatics
// Somatic Activisms
// Social Somatics & Applied Somatics
// Somatics and the creative processes in dance
// Cultural Somatics and Critical Whiteness
// Somatic Performance Cultures
// The Power of Touch in a post-pandemic world
// Moving Masculinities & Gender
// De-Colonising the Field
// De-Centering Whiteness
// Somatic Education for different Age-Groups
// Somatics and diverse abilities
// Re-moving Trauma; Somatics in the Digital Age
// Intercultural Somatic Networks
// Eco-Somatics, Post-Humanism & Eco-Crisis
// Re-Embodiment and/as Re-Empowerment
// Somatics as micro-activisms in city-environments
// Theorising Critical Somatic Practices
* The title of BODY IQ Festival 2021 has been inspired by the term Bodies of cultures, coined by Resmaa Menekem, Healer, Trauma Specialist and Author of the book 'My Grandmother's Hands’ (2017). His ground breaking work raises our awareness of the somatic sources of racial trauma. It suggests that the power for change is to be found in our bodies, and how our brains have been wired through centuries. It refers to white-body supremacy which through colonialist European oppression still impacts our daily life today, and how black, brown, POC bodies are being perceived. Menekem also coined the inspiring term Somatic Abolitionism as an emergent 'living, embodied anti-racist practice and cultural building —a way of being in the world’.