photo by Chris Foster taken at White Rabbit 2013
I am where I am
by Sally Morgan
an ongoing site responsive series
There is a sense of placelessness and disembodiment that arises from disconnection with the natural environment associated with the fear of climate change and global environmental problems. This dislocation contributes to psychosomatic and psychoterratic mental health (McCallum; Albrecht; Abram; Evernden). From an ontological ecocentric perspective we, in western culture, live in a world containing sensorially overwhelmed bodies. The more-than-human community reflects the stress that the land experiences, performing a type of trauma—a disengagement from, or loss of place; a disorganized nervous system; a sense of not belonging—that affects bodies on a cellular level.
I believe we are embodiment of a diseased/dis-eased environment. The "hyperactive rhythm of capitalism"(Brennan in Thomas 117) we consistently experience and confront creates a tonic state of dis-ease felt in the body. A pathology of place imprints itself onto/into bodies as a re-enactment or performance of a dis-eased environment (or place). How can return new life to our dulled senses? What are the pathways to reconnect?
In employing an ecosomatic approach to uncovering a pathology of place it is obvious to see/feel that when our lives are denatured we are lacking in ways to make connections to the entire system. We feel less value for who and where we are and therefore feel a loss, an ambivalence, and perhaps we even float, ungrounded, in between, in a liminal space of dislocation.
A movement towards regaining an embodied, and what Glenn Albrecht terms, soliphilic, sense of place will not come easily. Ecosomatic practices and/or performance experiments can be a form of resistance against solastalgic gloom, but can also be looked at as perhaps a daylighting of sorts—uncovering what has been buried as a way to honour and mourn the deterioration of relationship between body and place.
Citations
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous - Perception and Language in a
More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage, 2007.
Albrecht, Glenn. "Solastalgia." Alternatives Journal 32.4/5 (2006):
34-36. Environment Complete. Web. 12
June 2014.
—http://www.psychoterratica.com/ (2013)
Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Humankind and the
Environment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
McCallum,
Ian. “A Sense of Place—A Sense of Self”. In Hope
Beneath our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World. Martin Keogh,
Ed. Berkely, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010. 145-149.
Thomas, Arden. “Stillness in Nature: Eeo
Stubblefield’s Still Dance With Anna Halprin” in Arons, Wendy and Theresa J.
May Readings in Performance and Ecology. New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, 113-124.
