TANZPAKT Dresden Research Residency with the Botanical Garden of TU Dresden.

The research question behind this residency was inspired by a 2019 exhibition titled after Hieronymus Bosch’s 1500’s masterpiece ‘Garten der Irdischen Freuden’ at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. The exhibition dealt with the Anthropocene in relation to topics such as seed politics, legacies of colonialism and historical segregation. The exhibition examined the garden as a place of duality and contradiction: between harmony and chaos, exclusion and inclusion, utopia and dystopia. Further investigation led to the problematics behind the term Anthropocene and the discovery of dark ecology Timothy Morton’s term subscendence. Subscendence simply put means the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts. Somatic practices amongst other things, facilitate a subscendence of the body, allowing the experiencer to access a cellular, neural and and metabolic level of listening and understanding. Facing climate extinction, how do somatic practices allow us to re-situate ourselves as a part of a symbiotic community of plants and why is consciously breathing an act of radical resistance?