Territories of Knowledge
Embodied Garden
Embodied and affective practices in the garden
7. September 2025
15.00-19.00
15.00-19.00
Save the Date
All ages welcome
in English/multilingual
Embodied Garden is a site-specific project that invites bodies to inhabit the garden as a space of listening, decay, encounter, and rest. Rooted in decolonial thought and eco-somatic practices, the project proposes four embodied interventions that shift the centrality of the human and open space for affective relations with vegetal, microbial, and more-than-human worlds. By working with the senses—touch, smell, hearing, gravity, and rest—we propose gestures of deceleration and attention that resist extractivist logics and invite collective forms of attunement.
Register here
The garden becomes not only a site, but a collaborator—a living terrain that holds memory, transformation, and refusal. Each intervention activates a specific mode of bodily presence, encouraging participants to unlearn and reorient their perception toward other rhythms of existence.
This workshop may be particularly relevant for artists, activists, educators, caregivers, and those involved in collective health, political ecology, or transformative pedagogy. It also welcomes anyone seeking to slow down, listen to their body, and imagine other ways of being present and living together in times of planetary crisis.
The work is grounded in the understanding that aesthetic and embodied experience plays a crucial role in deepening the dimensions of social and climate justice. By engaging the body as a site of perception, relation, and transformation, the workshop invites participants to explore how gestures, presence, and collective sensitivity can open new paths for reimagining coexistence and care in times of crisis.
English is the common language of the event. Each session can be additionally conveyed in the native tongue of the workshop giver.
Interventions:
1. Rest with the Garden
By Marina Guzzo (Portuguese and English)
This intervention invites participants to lie down, sit, and slow down with the garden. It explores rest as an act of political resistance and ecological attunement.
2. Fall with the Garden
By Sophie Spiral Schultze-Allen (German and English)
A movement-based exploration of gravitational surrender and ecological humility. This session invites participants to explore what it means to fall in relation to roots, decaying matter, and the cycles of composting.
3. Smell the Garden
By Mayıs Tokel (Turkish and English)
Embodied Scent and Sensory Memory. In this immersive smell workshop, participants are invited to explore the deep connections between scent, memory, and identity through hands-on engagement with aromatic plants, herbs, and soils.
4. Listen to the Garden
By João Simão (Portuguise and English)
This sound-based action invites participants into deep listening. Using minimal sonic amplification and guided attention, João creates a situation where the garden’s subtle soundscape becomes audible: insect calls, rustling leaves, microbial hums, and our own breath.
The Embodied Garden Workshop was created from the artistic research of Marina Guzzo, developed in Brazil at Federal University of São Paulo and in partnership with the Affective Societies research center at Freie Universität Berlin.
