agriculture as embodiment

My artistic research investigates how embodied practices generate situated knowledge through processes of listening, land-based labor, communal dynamics, and environmental attunement. Working through Body Weather as a primary methodology, I explore how performance can be resituated within rural, agricultural, and communal contexts. Through durational and long-term site engagement, movement laboratories, walking practices, and collaborative fieldwork, my work examines relationships between bodies, landscape, microclimate, and everyday collective life.

Within my work, performance is understood as an expanded and relational practice rather than a solely staged or representational event. Rooted in dance and movement lineages, performance functions as an embodied mode of attention and enactment through which relationships between body, environment, labor, and collective life are explored. By maintaining a strong connection to dance as a field of embodied knowledge and transmission, my work seeks to honor its histories while extending performance toward durational, ecological, and communal contexts.

The aim of my research is to re-situate and expand Body Weather as an embodied research practice that understands the body as an ecological and relational environment shaped through labor, climate, and collective inhabitation. Rooted in the Body Weather lineage initiated by Min Tanaka and developed through an international community of practitioners, this research engages with the understanding of the body as a force of nature and the environment as an active teacher.

Through long-term engagement with rural and small-scale agricultural contexts, my work investigates how Body Weather can be practiced and re-articulated within contemporary farming environments that share ethical commitments to ecological care, sustainability, and communal modes of living with the expanded notion to include humans and non humans. In this context, agricultural labor, daily tasks, and environmental attunement become performative and knowledge-generating practices.

My research is guided by the following questions: How can Body Weather function as an embodied research practice where environment, agricultural labor, and climate act as teachers shaping bodily knowledge? How can performance emerge from agricultural work, daily communal tasks, and environmental attunement beyond studio and stage contexts?

Body Weather Lineage

My research develops in dialogue with the Body Weather lineage initiated by Min Tanaka and his collaborators in Japan, and continuously shaped through an international community of practitioners and teachers. Body Weather proposes the body as a dynamic environment influenced by internal and external forces, emphasizing labor, climate, daily practice, and collective training as central components of embodied knowledge. My work builds upon this lineage through ongoing practice, collaboration, and pedagogical exchange, approaching Body Weather as a living and evolving methodology that adapts to different ecological and cultural contexts.

Methods

I combine embodied, site-responsive, and collective methodologies that emerge through temporal and long-term engagement with specific ecological, agricultural, and social environments. Body Weather forms the primary methodological foundation of my practice, approaching the body as an ever-changing field shaped by weather, landscape, labor, and collective interaction through physical training, sensory listening/attunement, and environmental exposure. I work through durational site-based practices, engaging in extended residencies and repeated returns to rural, agricultural, and communal environments, where knowledge develops through sustained bodily presence, repetition, seasonal observation, and the accumulation of sensory and relational experience. Walking functions as a temporal and spatial research tool through which the body maps terrain, microclimate, and social environments, allowing attention to unfold through rhythm, duration, and environmental listening. Many research processes develop through shared training, movement laboratories, and communal labor, where collective physical practice supports relational and non-hierarchical forms of knowledge transmission. I also develop movement scores, embodied tasks, and practice protocols that translate environmental and experiential knowledge into transmissible and repeatable forms. 

Documentation is supported through the collective notebook, which functions as both research tool and archive, allowing participants to contribute drawings, movement scores, written reflections, and environmental observations through shared authorship. Where resources and project budgets allow, documentation is also explored collectively through 8mm film. The choice of this medium relates to its material vulnerability and temporal limitations, which resonate with the fragile, process-based nature of embodied research. Super 8 film resists excessive control, high-resolution capture, and endless reproducibility, offering instead a medium shaped by unpredictability, grain, light sensitivity, and the finite duration of the film roll. This vulnerability mirrors Body Weather practice, which similarly resists fixed representation and complete capture.

Working with 8mm also shifts documentation from external observation toward embodied participation. The physical weight and steadiness required to operate the camera introduces another layer of bodily training, where filming becomes an exercise in studying one body through another, the body of the camera. Editing largely occurs within the act of filming itself, as the limited length of the film roll requires decisions to be made in real time, foregrounding attention, care, and collective negotiation.

The use of 8mm offers a creative response to the inherent limitations of documenting embodied and relational practices. Rather than attempting to fully represent or explain the work, it allows traces, atmospheres, and partial impressions to emerge. The medium also supports collective authorship, as filming responsibilities can circulate among participants rather than being assigned to an external observer. While working with outside documenters remains valuable and constitutes a research inquiry in its own right, collective filming through 8mm enables documentation to remain embedded within the shared practice of shaken subjectivity and agency surrendering, reflecting Body Weather’s emphasis on relational knowledge production.

Body Weather, when re-engaged within agricultural contexts, explores how a practice that increasingly developed within studio and workshop environments following the closure of Min Tanaka’s Body Weather Farm in Hakushu (active from the mid-1980s until 2010) can be re-situated within rural and farming environments. Returning Body Weather to agricultural settings resonates with the early Body Weather Farm principles, where daily labor and environmental conditions function as teachers shaping bodily perception and movement. Working within contemporary small-scale and agro-ecological farming communities introduces additional dimensions, as agricultural work unfolds through seasonal cycles, ecological care, collective responsibility, and long-term relationships with land and non-human environments. Within these contexts, training, labor, performance, and daily life become interwoven rather than separated. Farm-based Body Weather emphasizes environmental unpredictability, sustained bodily engagement with land and climate, and knowledge emerging through repetition and labor, while fostering collective attention and shared responsibility. Through these conditions, performance shifts from presentation toward inhabitation, allowing embodied knowledge to develop through lived ecological and communal experience.

Engaging in these contexts also brings artists-researchers into close dialogue with farmers who consciously position their practices in relation to sustainability, reduced mechanization, and alternative relationships to land and animal care. Rather than framing these approaches as utopian alternatives, this research acknowledges their negotiation within contemporary economic and social realities. Through these encounters, parallels emerge between the autonomy of artistic practice and small-scale ecological farming, revealing shared forms of political agency, embodied knowledge, and physical pleasure in the cultivation of both land and artistic practice.