Somatic architecture is the one capable of assuming in its systems and materiality the ecological and socio-political vicissitudes of multiple bodies. In addition somatic architecture learn from the living tissues and processes of bodies and establishes with them assemblages of living matter, life forms and artificial intelligences.

There are five main aspects that articulate somatic architectures:

1/ Spatial navigation, where we study and work with dissident geometries and positions of bodies and unstable grounds; 2/ Living systems, considering and learning from our animal body and relationships in between bodies and environments, also living matter in its structure; 3/ Anthropology of the senses, where we address cultural and idiographic meanings given to experiences using somatic ethnographies, happenings, and studies on dance and architecture; 4/Imagination, looking into imaginaries and body images and their politic and ecological implications; and 5/ Embodied cognition, including somatic epistemology, non conscious and distributed cognition and ecologies of intimacy.

Somatic architecture works both, to give support to the more vulnerable bodies and to regulate – through somatic learning and activism – the excessive requirements of the privileged bodies.

Somatic architecture is the work of our platform PSAAP and its associated laboratory LSAAP. Nowadays we work with bodies and in projects and research of architecture, landscape, city, art or performance.

Author: María Auxiliadora Gálvez

Images: Collage by María Auxiliadora Gálvez. Fragments of images by Matthias Weischer and María Auxiliadora Gálvez