Eco Expression

🌳 Eco Expression — Artistic Residency 🌳

Exploring the realms and applications of artistic performance in tree scapes.

📍 Varese, Italy 🗓️ 2 – 4 July 2027 ⏰ 09:00 – 17:00 daily 🎟️ Early Bird £160 (by Feb 1st) | Standard £180

🌿 What's Inside?

This gathering is centred around the practical, philosophical, political, and pedagogical approaches to artistic creation and performance in tree scapes.

It's a chance for performers, artists, and practitioners to take their work into a new dimension — embedding their current practice within trees, and exploring the affordances tree spaces offer for nourishing our artistic, performative, and creative sensibilities. 🌲

We'll move between two modes of learning:

• 🔼 Vertical — a space to learn ideas, methods, and practices proposed by us

• 🔄 Horizontal — learning through collective intelligence, shared embodied practice, and emergent pedagogy

By the end, you'll leave with:

1. 🎭 New ways of applying, thinking about, and expressing your current art form in tree scapes

2. 🧰 A set of practices you can use and share within tree scapes

3. 🌱 Nourished eco-artistic, creative, and performative sensibilities to carry into future projects

🍃 The Learning Approach

🕺 Participatory Action — Transformation through direct experience. Material will be co-creational and emergent, drawing on Contact Improvisation, Contemporary Dance, the Feldenkrais Method, Arboreal Locomotion, Parkour, and Martial Arts.

👀 Witnessing Observation — Learning by seeing. Time spent quietly watching and observing as a route to integration and deeper introspection.

💬 Reflexive Discussion — Developing shared language. Building shared vocabulary for phenomenological experience, and exploring how our disciplines translate into non-human-made contexts.

🧠 Collective Research — Cultivating collective intelligence. Co-created research with no single leader — everyone as a generative figure moving toward something emergent and collective. A pillar of this residency.

🙋 Who Is This For?

⚠️ This residency is not open level.

Designed for people already deep into their own performative/artistic medium — e.g. circus performers, dancers, acro-yogis, avid rock/tree climbers, acrobats, and parkour athletes.

Expect high-level physical practice in vertical environments. Strong spatial awareness, falling ability, and good weight-distribution skills will be necessary.

Not sure if you're a good fit? Get in touch — we're happy to chat it through. ✉️

🧳 Practical Information

🚆 Transport

• Just outside central Varese, Italy

• Closest station: Varese Station — a 25-minute walk or 10-minute bus

• Direct train access from Milan Malpensa airport

⛺ Accommodation

• Hosted in a large private garden full of ancient Italian trees

• Bring your own camping gear (tent, sleeping bag, mat)

• Full kit list provided upon booking confirmation

🍎 Food & Water

• Food not included

• Supermarket just 3 minutes' walk from the property

• Drinkable water on site, plus a large communal fridge

🚿 Amenities

• Showers and bathrooms on site

• Communal fridge

🎟️ Sign Up

📅 2–4 July 2027 | ⏰ 09:00–17:00 | 📍 Varese, Italy 💷 Early Bird £160 (before Feb 1st) → Standard £180

📧 Rootsofplay@gmail.com