agriculture as embodiment

EDHEA, Master of Fine Arts
Sierre, Switzerland
21-22 October 2024

Since 2016, I have been collaborating with artist and researcher Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro to explore Body Weather as an ecosomatic pedagogy in which performance, ecological awareness, and agricultural labor intersect. Within this collaboration, Body Weather is approached as an open-ended and non-linear embodied practice developed by choreographer Min Tanaka and the Maijuku company in rural Japan during the 1980s. Emerging from intersections between radical embodiment, postmodern dance, and vernacular agricultural cultures, Body Weather proposes the body as a force of nature: ever-changing, omni-centered, and highly receptive to environmental and relational stimuli, while resisting fixed hierarchies and predetermined forms.

The Body Weather laboratory at EDHEA invited Master of Fine Arts students to engage with the practice through a two-day intensive program combining sensorial exercises, listening practices, movement laboratories, readings, and collective discussions. The laboratory focused on exploring the phenomenological and aesthetic implications of Body Weather, investigating how embodied practice can challenge dominant models of production, commodification, and authorship across artistic and agricultural contexts.

Part of the laboratory unfolded in the local vineyard landscapes in the mountainous region of Sierre, where participants engaged in site-responsive movement and observational practices. Working within the vineyard environment allowed students to encounter agricultural space as a performative and pedagogical environment, exploring relationships between terrain, climate, seasonal labor, and bodily perception. The vineyard context extended the studio-based work toward direct environmental engagement, emphasizing how agricultural landscapes shape sensory awareness, rhythm, and collective attention.

This laboratory forms part of our ongoing research into Body Weather as an ecosomatic and land-based performance methodology, examining how embodied practice can reconnect artistic training with ecological environments, agricultural knowledge, and collective modes of learning.

Vassiliki Tsagari Olive Orchard
Peloponnese, Greece
23-24 September 2024

In September 2024, I collaborated with choreographer, performer, and Skinner Releasing practitioner Vassiliki Tsagari and performer Thanos Oikonomoloulos in a Body Weather laboratory hosted within their olive orchard near Gargalianoi in the Peloponnese, Greece. Vassiliki and Thanos maintain and cultivate approximately 420 olive trees through fully biological and largely manual agricultural methods, consciously resisting mechanized interventions and relying on sustained body-based labor.

The laboratory emerged primarily as a gesture of support and shared labor, acknowledging the physical demands of maintaining the orchard, where nearly all processes, including pruning, branch collection, soil care, harvesting preparation, and seasonal maintenance, are carried out manually across extensive rows of trees. Working collectively within these repetitive and physically demanding conditions allowed the Body Weather practice to unfold through agricultural tasks rather than through separated training structures.

Together with analogue filmmaker Vassilis Bourikas, director, curator of analogue film festivals, and specialist in film-based documentation, we embedded ourselves within the daily orchard work. During this period, the collective activity focused on gathering pruned olive branches and transporting them to designated pits where they were burned and transformed into biochar, contributing to soil regeneration and ecological maintenance of the land.

The laboratory also functioned as an exchange between choreographic and agricultural practices, exploring how movement knowledge and improvisational methods intersect with sustained physical labor. Particular attention was given to how somatic imagery and release-based movement principles could support bodily endurance and injury prevention, including approaches to releasing tension in hips and shoulders, strategies for navigating uneven terrain and dense branches, and ways of negotiating spatial disorientation produced by the visual repetition of the orchard landscape.

The presence of analogue film documentation introduced an additional layer of research inquiry. Working with Bourikas prompted reflection on the role of the camera as both observer and participant within embodied practice. The camera’s position as an external witnessing device required continuous negotiation between visibility, intimacy, and the non-representational aspects of Body Weather practice. The analogue film process, with its material and temporal constraints, offered a sensitive mode of documentation that paralleled the vulnerability and durational nature of the agricultural and performative work.

This laboratory forms part of my ongoing research into Body Weather within small-scale agricultural contexts, examining how manual land-based labor can operate as choreographic training, collective practice, and ecological care, while investigating the relationships between documentation, embodied knowledge, and shared artistic survival strategies.

Open Fields Residency – Universalmuseum Joanneum
Biobauernhof Moar in Graslupp, Neumarkt in Styria, Austria
18 August - 3 September 2023

A research milestone in the collaboration with artist and researcher Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro was the Open Fields – Art and Agriculture residency organized by Universalmuseum Joanneum. The residency took place at Biobauernhof Moar in Graslupp, the organic farm of Konrad Liebchen, located within the Zirbitzkogel-Grebenzen Nature Park in Styria. The farm is dedicated to sustainable agricultural practices and the conservation breeding of endangered domestic livestock species.

During a two-week residency, we established a temporary research laboratory, landscape and studio practice embedded within the daily rhythms of the farm. The project was developed collectively with interdisciplinary co-researchers Nicolas Gabriel, Sophie Krier, Antti Uimonen, and Tiia Veneranta, whose practices span performance, visual arts, writing, and design-based research. Working across disciplines allowed the laboratory to operate as a shared field of embodied and conceptual inquiry, rather than as a production-driven rehearsal structure.

Grounded in Body Weather practice, the project Farm/Dance, Feeling/Doing, Focus/Derail (Agriculture as Embodiment) investigated how agricultural labor, environmental exposure, and shared rural living conditions could generate choreographic and research material. The process unfolded through physical training, site-responsive movement exploration, and direct participation in agricultural tasks, allowing us to engage closely with the ecological and temporal structures of the farm and its working environment.

Daily activities, including animal care, field work, and environmental observation, became sources for movement experimentation, collective reflection, and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Through these processes, the research explored how bodily perception and creative thinking are shaped through proximity to land, animals, climate, and seasonal labor cycles, supported by the knowledge and agricultural and animal practices maintained on Konrad’s farm.

The residency culminated in a performance emerging from these shared embodied processes, presenting choreography, an open-ended score, as an extension of lived agricultural experience rather than as a separate artistic product. The work emphasized relational attention between human and non-human actors, landscape, and agricultural activity, reinforcing Body Weather’s understanding of environment and labor as pedagogical and creative forces.

This residency formed an important stage within our ongoing research into Body Weather as an ecosomatic and land-based performance methodology, investigating how agricultural environments function simultaneously as sites of artistic training, ecological knowledge production, and collective research practice.

Body Weather Laboratory meets Interior Architecture & Furniture Design (IAFD)

Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)

April 2023

I was invited to lead a Body Weather laboratory for the Interior Architecture & Furniture Design department (IAFD) at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). The laboratory took place at the Cloud Dance Studio nearby the academy and extended into the immediate urban surroundings of the Hague. Working within a department dedicated to spatial design, material investigation, and embodied experience of built environments, the laboratory introduced Body Weather as a somatic methodology for spatial research. The studio itself became the primary field of inquiry: floors, walls, light conditions, acoustics, and furniture prototypes were approached as dynamic partners in perception. Through weight-based exercises, attention practices, and site-responsive movement explorations, students engaged architecture as lived experience rather than abstract form. By moving between the studio contained conditions and the surrounding urban environment, the laboratory examined how bodily perception shifts across thresholds, from interior surfaces and controlled atmospheres to pavement textures, wind exposure, and city sound. In this context, Body Weather functioned not as choreography for performance but as a tool for sensing scale, proportion, resistance, and atmosphere, positioning the body as a primary measuring instrument within spatial design processes.

Four Siblings Garden
Amsterdam West
July - October 2021

Four Siblings Public Garden is a community-led gardening collective in Amsterdam West that transforms underused urban land into a shared space for ecological cultivation and neighborhood gathering. Working with the site’s infrastructural constraints, underground kerosene pipelines supplying Schiphol Airport that prevent heavy construction, the collective practices lightweight, regenerative, and seasonal forms of land care grounded in commoning and volunteer stewardship.

I was invited by the Four Siblings collective in 2021 to lead four Body Weather laboratories within this context, engaging gardening as embodied and regenerative practice.

Building on the collective’s ecological ethos, the laboratories approached the garden as both cultivation site and somatic field. The condition of fragile ground above hidden industrial infrastructure became a conceptual and physical starting point: how do we move on land that cannot bear weight? How does awareness shift when growth and extractive systems coexist beneath our feet?

The themes of the workshops were aligned with weather patterns, seasonal timing, and harvest cycles. Practices included trailing and mapping the water supply, blindfolded watering to heighten sensitivity to water distribution and absorption, sensing soil density and moisture through touch and weight transfer, weeding as rhythmic repetition, and exploring land–body manipulations, stimulations, and encounters.

Through these exercises, gardening was reframed as perceptual training. Participants cultivated attention to gravity, fragility, resistance, and interdependence, allowing Body Weather to operate as a method of attuning to urban ecological tensions through direct physical engagement with soil, water, season presence and transitions, as well as agricultural cycles. 

St. Hubert Millet Farm, Nantes, France
10-15 August 2021

In 2021, I was invited by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro to join his research on Dissident Grains during his residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Stéphane was fascinated by millet and other “small grains,” which he considers forgotten cereals, overlooked by techno-scientific modernity yet carrying an inherent embodiment of continuous resistance to homogenization, imperialism, and patriarchal structures. Drawing a parallel with Body Weather practice, a methodology resisting fixation and commodification of the dancing body, we collaborated to lead a Body Weather laboratory on a millet farm in St. Hubert, Nantes. We formed a small group as temporal collective and we all engaged in embodied attention, movement improvisation, and sensory attunement within the rhythms of the millet farm in the middle of August. Working with millet as both material and teacher allowed the participants to explore resistance, care, and attentiveness in the body’s interaction with ecological processes while highlighting how small grains carry histories of physical, cultural and political resilience

Zone Sensible - Parti Poétique

St. Denis, Paris, France
2-6 October 2018

As part of Parti Poétique at Zone Sensible, an exhibition and performance program situated in the last urban farm of Paris in St. Denis, I collaborated with Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro to lead a Body Weather laboratory that culminated in a public performance.

Zone Sensible is an agricultural and cultural site where artistic practice, ecological thinking, and food sovereignty intersect. Within this context, the laboratory explored Body Weather as a method of attuning the body to the rhythms of cultivated land and collective work. Through movement improvisation, sensory exercises, and engagement with the farm environment, participants developed an embodied dialogue with the soil, plants, and agricultural gestures present on the site.

The laboratory unfolded over several days and concluded with a performance emerging from these shared experiences, situating choreography within the living ecology of the farm and its social and political context.

Learn more about Zone Sensible:
https://www.parti-poetique.org/les-lieux/zone-sensible/

Body Weather Laboratory

Elefsina, Athens, Greece

27 May 2017

I was invited by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro to lead a Body Weather laboratory in collaboration with Nature Addicts Fund and Elefsis21, as part of a week-long gathering of internationally selected artists reflecting on Elefsina’s future as European Capital of Culture 2021.

The laboratory took place together with artists to explore the historicity of Elefsina, an industrial and mythologically layered site, through embodied practice and ecological thinking. Through outdoors MB, movement improvisation, drawing/sensory exercises, and site-responsive attention, the group investigated how the body can perceive and respond to the environmental, cultural, and political textures of the place.

The laboratory functioned as a collective space for artists to think through the relationship between landscape, history, and artistic practice, opening a dialogue between the industrial memory of Elefsina and emerging ecological perspectives in contemporary art, as further proposals for the upcoming years of artistic activity. 

Body Weather Laboratory, INLAND Village, Asturias, Spain
23-30 May 2016

In May 2016, I was invited by artist and agroecologist Fernando García-Dory to facilitate a Body Weather laboratory during the annual gathering of INLAND in Asturias, Spain. Founded by García-Dory in 2009, INLAND is a collaborative platform working at the intersection of art, agriculture, and rural social practice. The initiative brings together artists, farmers, researchers, and cultural practitioners to explore alternative relationships between land, culture, and rural livelihoods.

At the time, the collective had begun gathering in an abandoned village in the mountains of Asturias, gradually transforming it into a shared site for experimentation, reflection, and collective living between artistic and agroecological practices.

Within this context, I was invited to introduce Body Weather as a method for thinking through and with the body in relation to land. The laboratory unfolded through daily movement training, environmental listening exercises, and collective practices engaging the surrounding terrain, weather conditions, and rhythms of rural life.

An important encounter during the laboratory was with Nell, who at the time was the first and only shepherd living alone in the nearby mountains. Nell guided the group on a long walk through the mountainous landscape, sharing his practice of locating and guiding his goats after they had roamed freely through the terrain. Observing and studying the weight distribution, balance, and embodied intelligence of a shepherd moving across steep and uneven ground became a powerful learning moment. The physical knowledge embedded in this way of moving through the landscape resonated strongly with Body Weather’s ethic of “the place as teacher,” allowing participants to understand how bodily awareness, terrain, and livelihood practices are deeply intertwined.

Learn more about Inland here: https://www.inland.org/en

Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Ongoing Body Weather practice

Since 2011, I have been a regular practitioner and member of the Body Weather Amsterdam platform led by Katerina Bakatsaki and Frank van de Ven. Through this long-term engagement, I have participated in weekly trainings and laboratories led by Katerina and/or Frank and held throughout the year, forming a continuous foundation for my embodied practice and research.

As part of this trajectory, I joined a three-year cycle of practice-based research focused on the nature of MB (Mind–Body / Muscle–Bone) training, developed with an international group of practitioners. This period brought together long-term Body Weather practitioners from diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and eras of practice each exploring how the practice could be interwoven into their own contexts, artistic, pedagogical, ecological, daily. The exchange created a rich field of perspectives on how Body Weather can evolve through different lived realities and practices up to today and on, keeping it as a contemporary, current and relevent practice. 

Within the Amsterdam platform, I have also contributed to the organization of laboratories dedicated to manipulation practice, and assisted in inviting Hisako Horikawa to Amsterdam to lead workshops and share her expertise with the local community.

In addition, I joined the Body Weather laboratory at Centre National de la Danse (CND) in Paris together with Christine Quoiraud, Frank van de Ven, and Oguri. The week-long program combined intensive practice sessions with an exhibition and panel discussions reflecting on archival materials and historical trajectories of Body Weather practice.