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

One of the possible outcomes of this process will be an audio-visual installation and performative lecture. The images we are working with consist of large rock formations of Hierve el Agua (spanish for "the water boils"). It is a set of natural travertine rock formations in San Lorenzo Albarradas, Oaxaca, Mexico. They resemble cascades of water. The film is edited by video artist Antto Solari and conceived during our research trip to Oaxaca in the beginning of the year 2025.

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).

This work asks the audience a simple question that is hard to answer : how do they feel when they think of climate (change)?