Making Connection: Ecosomatic creative encounters of the ecological body in the urban environment

RMIT Mapping Future Imaginaries enabling impact research network - Making Connection program

The Making Connection co-labs take place at RMIT Melbourne 11-15 December 2023. Produced by the Mapping Future Imaginaries network, Making Connection explores the importance of creative encounters for social connection. Come and co-explore with artists, researchers and industry specialists how creative encounters build our relationships with place, and help design frameworks for making connection.

Making Connection: Mapping creative encounters of the ecological body in eco-somatic practice in the urban environment

This workshop invites participants to engage with ecosomatic practices as prompts to our ecological bodies - real-time, moving memory banks - to generate stories yet untold. Delivered indoors and outdoors in the more-than-human urban environmental surrounds of RMIT city campus, we will use expanded listening practices which attune to proprioceptive and multisensory feedback, exploring our relationship to gravity, weight and time. Employing creative techniques including contemplative photography, sound drawing and collective poetic text we will creatively map the ‘stories’ from our embodied experiences and collectively share our moving encounters. New insights into how corporeal movement can serve as an alternative pathway to relationship with place and feelings of connection will be discovered.

Bring: water bottle, comfortable clothing for movement and weather conditions, camera/phone, and notebook (optional) Drawing materials will be provided.

We suggest a small carry bag to transport everything!

Facilitators: Vanessa Chapple and Emily Bowman