Sick Practice: Stretching Exercises to Feel Climate Change

Stretching Exercises to Feel Climate Change is an ongoing, practice based research on what it feels like to live in times of global (environmental) crisis. It looks for visceral, body based, more-than-human, collective forms of knowledge and calls for resistance.

I have been busy thinking of climate change and how we could re-imagine the future, embracing the unstoppable and the irreversible and talking about strategies of survival. I want to queer futures, scenarios and imaginaries, to move away from the doomsday versions, drawn by those who seem to want to enable any form of resistance.

How The project explores strategies for cultivating sustainability, togetherness and collaboration, in a context of a global crisis. How can embodied practice, focused on learning with more- than- human entities, make us feel and move with the emotional and ecological impacts of climate change? This research draws from the writings of Anna Tsing, Astrida Neimanis and Brigite Schneider and investigates how movement, sensory perception, and dance can foster a sense of interconnection with the environment and transform climate-related despair, paralysis and helplessness into collective resilience. The study aims to develop tools that move climate awareness from intellectual understanding to embodied action (from head to the heart), offering pathways for navigating the complexities of ecological crises.

What is seen First exercise: An Attempt on Weathering the Waterfall, an audiovisual installation + performance as part of the Annual Diploma Show of the MA in Transdisciplinary Studies at ZHDK (May 2025). The work explores embodied and collective modes of sensing environmental crisis and engages with the temporal and emotional dimensions of climate change. The performance takes place within the audiovisual installation created during a research trip to Oaxaca, Mexico in early 2025, together with a Anto Logy. In the video, next to the waterfall, a human figure is seen, dressed in a way that camouflages and merges with the rocks. The video is edited in loops of multiple lengths, breaking the movement of the figure, as it tries to find its way on the rock. <...> climb up, try to get close, look for a way to be close, get humbled by its magnitude and solid performance, troubled, lay down, press the (queer eastern european) cheek on its rough, dusty and still a little wet surface, smell the sour and the sulfur, listen, surrender, submit.. not allowed to be here, trespassing the signs that say ‘no entrance’, not allowed to be here, yet made the way and laid down and thanks to grandmother's magical knitting, camouflage, ask questions and hopefully have it answer, have a non verbal dialogue with the non verbal more-than-human ancient monster, a transformer, that lurks, reminding that the western human way of counting time can f*** right off, ask for a weather report ? <...> (by Ula Liagaitė). The video material works as a visual exploration of the concept of “thick time” and sets the tone and climate of the performance. <...> the temporal frame of “thick time”—a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. <...> (the term coined by scholars Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker). <...> gradually, like a lego being constructed piece by piece, from micro plastics and space debris, smog and oil spillages hovering over the (hyper) sea - here you are, a magnificent monster. You are so hot. The weather is perfect. The sun blasts through that ever-thinning layer of invisible co2, which once protected us from burning. It's getting so hot here. Come towards me, I open all the doors and windows, take a few pills of vitamin D in summer, put spf 1500 hell knows how many UVA and UVA and UVB filters on my face. Just the face, because the skin on hands is a lost cause anyway <...> ( by Ula Liagaitė)

Second exercise: A Manual On Stretching (coming soon) A text work, contributing to ISSUES - an annual, peer-led digital publication which serves as the milestone collective public offering for each School of Commons (SoC) program cycle. ISSUES collates and contextualises the processes, practices and methodologies of each participating project within SoC. For this publication a mixed media work is being developed (drawing, writing, collage, sketch, map) as some sort of a manual on what kind of exercises can be practiced in order to feel the crisis and the change and how to move this knowledge from ‘head to heart’. It is a conceptual, yet practical way of landing the thoughts on paper, that will take shape as a physical publication, as well as an open access online publication. Third exercise: Alone Together Somewhere Hot (public showing in December 2025, location tbc).  From October 2025, Ula will hold weekly, regular, group movement practice in her dance studio in Zürich. It will softly transform into a rehearsal period towards the end of November and into the show(s) mid December 2025. We will present a transdisciplinary dance-theater work, in the form of an open rehearsal or an exercise. <...> Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk, and I enlist its assistance. I am now an encounter in motion, a woman-and-stick. It is hard for me to think of any challenge I might face without soliciting the assistance of others, human and not human. It is an unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasise—counterfactually—that we each survive alone <...> (The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing). If you need to move and would like to participate in the regular, guided movement practice in Zürich, write a letter to ula.juroj@gmail.com. To view the installation video, visit www.ulaliagaite.com