as part of the (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures: Ecosomatics festival 23-25 June 2022 at Floating University, Berlin
Radical Empathy Lab (REL) is a nomadic, on-going eco-social and research laboratory for a holistic activation of knowledge. It embraces relational –versus informational– learning, and what Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik calls “the knowing body”. REL works across disciplines and experiments with holistic advances, in which the cognitive intertwines with the non-semiotic and the sensual. Through exercises that find inspiration in Deep Listening, feminist and radical pedagogies and practices of mindfulness, we will rehearse to reconnect to our sensing, knowing bodies, and will practice towards stimulating a micropolitical critical consciousness for our ecological entanglements. The lab explores forms of being together, that allow us to reflect, to at least momentarily re-feel and to undo a reactionary an-aesthesia (Greek: an-aesthēsis: without sensation). By moving from individual to collective activity the lab experiments with the relation between micro and macro dimensions of agency, and with practices that carry the potential to decolonise and de-subjectivate the (social) body and its ecological relationality to the “Other”.
