The Wilds of the Body and the Earth: Esalen Institute Symposium

 

Image: Installation shot.  Credit: Sarah Bliss

 

Poetics of Skin sculptural video installation travels to California's Esalen Institute for Somatics Symposium

Somatics practitioners, permaculturists and eco-activists, including my Poetics collaborator Rosalyn Driscoll, are convening at Esalen later this month to share investigations into the ways “bodily experience, cultivated deeply and inquired into, is an important doorway to overcoming the alienation of humans from other beings, and from each other.”

Roz will be presenting a new version of our sculptural video installation, Poetics of Skin, which explores the intimate entwinement of body and nature. Poetics of Skin 2, a much smaller version of our installation, projects video of a couple into an egg-or-shell-like organic rawhide chamber.  The couple moves together as if trapped in the small space of the convoluted sculpture, appearing to be inside a body, an animal, or under the sea.  Viewers must move around the installation to catch glimpses of the bodies through skeins of rawhide.