Pop-Up Somatic Architecture… A PROJECT OF ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES… ARCHITECTURE EXUDED FROM MULTIPLE BODIES. A PROJECT ON INTERSECTIONALITY

POP-UP SOMATIC ARCHITECTURE is the one emerging in your awareness producing a full immersion within an architectonical experience of somatosensory material… Last only one experience BUT seed much more… and also feeds lines of creativity and sensorial tunes… lines of political and social discoveries and revelations.

The protagonist of this project are YOU, and YOU, and YOU, and YOU… each and every of us… and the collective imageries (about life and architecture) emerging being together… How many bodies and architectural experiences do you have inside? How is the architecture exuded from multiple bodies?

It is a participative project of ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES, about bodies and places, about how people give sense and meaning to their own experiences. Senses work not only under biological issues, they have also a cultural background. We want to research how diverse sensory-motor experiences going deep in perception, reveal cultural, architectural, social and political aspects useful to show a kind of sensorial ethnography. This, in an open debate will work like a multifaceted mirror with the participant communities. This would not be only a mirror talking to the participants but also to their socio-ecological, spatial and political systems. We want to think together and provide our experiences with multiple perspectives.

We should say that the base for this approximation to the construction of a richer citizen’s imagery, of a group with more social capital and more self-knowledge, more aware of its creative potential and more democratic, is in somatics. In the complex self-perception that every of us have with the intertwining of the environment and the social exchanges and contexts.

We bet for a kind of “imaginary pragmatics”, enhancing creativity from within… starting with the person and the recognition of their own resources as basis for the development of all the other aspects… revealing a socio-political and spatial frame in which everybody is indeed unique and indispensable.

The project starts becoming from a process- it started in 2018- that considers a collection of participatory sessions, a series of interviews that feed the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)** and a set of projects and maps that will have as outcome different formats about the study of anthropology of the senses and their architectural and socio-politic associated systems. The process is iterative in cycles… we don’t envision a final point but successive mutations.

The images in this post document some of these sessions. There are no images of work with the most vulnerable bodies. Currently we combine sessions in university and artistic environments (in the images), but we also work with vulnerable groups, NGOs such as Karibu, which works with African women, and groups from diverse backgrounds (Iranian and Eastern European women).

For the participatory sessions we use mainly the ATM (awareness through movement) sessions of the Feldenkrais method of somatic education. For the individual ones we use the same method in its IF (functional integration) format.