INTO THE WILD is a workshop for bodies and the city they create within the program PING! Galeria Municipal do Porto.

The flux of data traversing our bodies is bigger than our awareness can process. Words are not the main way of communication once we are in the wild. Our bodies instead learn to react to the environment by becoming more aware of an ecology of the sensual paying attention to what is in contact with our skin. Our systems of non conscious cognition establish a continuous flow of exchanges and reactions with the environment and with our fellow cognizers like animals and plants. Somatic markers and processes can reveal an alternative body awareness and its associated body images able to change our perception but also the meaning we give to our experiences. The result is a reformulation of borders and of the definition of bodies and environments. Wilderness emerges in this workshop from a different perspective over our urban bodies, and these bodies build another city.

The workshop will act in three stages developed in the Gardens of the Cristal Palace and their surroundings where the Galeria Municipal do Porto is located:

1-Nocturnal Garden: Darkness will act as a tool in order to reveal the queer ecologies of life where taxonomies are not so clear. This stage will start with a nocturnal walk that will lead us to the area of the old winter gardens. There we will develop a series of somatic experiences*, readings, collective narratives and theoretical inputs that will end in an experimental and participatory environment within one of the winter garden and their vegetal life.

2-Animal Body: We have never been human. Our nowadays classifications of the world were gestated in the XVIII Century and were having profound cultural and socio-political implications. Through the somatic experience of our interspecies body we will be immersed in an alternative configuration of these classifications that normally are taken for granted. The experience will give place to a participative environment inside the chapel organized as an art installation. After this immersion the awareness of our animal flesh will be explored using tools as drawings with temporal tattoo markers.

3-(E)Merging Bodies: After this process new bodies (e)merge in the margins. A walk into the wilder areas nearby will open the third part of the workshop. These new bodies are able to host different sensory organs and divergent political implications an assemblages. An alternative city grows from them and their practices unveiling somatic activisms. We will close the day in different parts of the garden like the backyard of the auditorium of the Galeria Municipal do Porto.

4-Epilogue of the workshop by Natalija Boljsakov and María Ruíz Villar.

INTO THE WILD is an immersion within feral and abandonment dynamics, within an interspecies city and the resulting emerging bodies along with the practices they are capable to achieve. The Gardens of the Cristal Palace are specially pertinent for this embodied research as they host in their memory a colonial past that can be confronted with the knowledge that the emerging bodies and the wild abandoned areas nearby can reveal.

DOWNLOAD HERE THE GUIDE FOR BODIES AND THE CITY THEY CREATE:

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