Chemical Relations Are Forever

How do we live with our chemically altered bodies? 

Focussing on inescapable chemical pollution, and specifically endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), this workshop brings people together to learn about and share experiences around living in a world where the basic necessities of life involve exposure to industrial chemicals.

Participants are guided through a series of embodied exercises and discussions that probe different interactions and responses to industrial chemicals, the products they inhabit and the ways we come in contact with them.

Across the day-long workshop we translate the theme of chemical contamination across mental, verbal and physical modalities, exploring methodologies that extend the senses, work with the knowledge of the body and use materials as prompts for movement and sound making to build new understandings that may not have been reached through thought and text based processes alone.

Somatic movement practice, led by Pati Masłowska, is used to extend the senses via the imagination, into the inner workings of the body. Inside the somatic practice we take inspiration from body/chemical interactions – the way hormone and hormone receptors work or the ways chemicals circulate through the body. The intention is through movement to begin understanding chemicals inside the body, as well as seeing connections with the space around us.

Reflecting on the connections between body and environment, body and material, we acknowledge the materiality of industrial chemicals and that our bodily encounters with the world are through this materiality. Here materials and objects become stepping off points for storytelling, for memories and the sharing of experiences, which in turn lead to a practice of movement and sound making. 

To complete the workshop all the discussion, actions and choreographies of the day are symbolically collected in a collectively developed ritual. Through a facilitated process the group sets an intention for the ritual and the appropriate symbols and actions for this goal. A ritual space is a liminal space outside the everyday that allows an embodied reflection and processing of the themes of the workshop, in a way deemed meaningful for the group.