SHAKEN and CONNECTED:
LISTENING TOWARDS SOCIAL BODIES

How can we learn to listen to plants? And what can we learn from plants that are highly disregarded as weeds about living in crisis and regeneration?

In this workshop Siegmar will combine two of her practices: Listening sessions, which serve as containers for collective public grieving, and learning from plants about social justice.

Drawing from knowledges passed down from Romanian aunts and great-grandmothers, we will meet plants and make a salve together. Plants can be companions in times of transformation, addressing both the individual and the social body to support collective struggles and resilience. We will ask how plants prepare and help us to live in solidarity with other humans and with a more than human world.

The listening sessions are offered as a practice for giving with our bodies as resonance spaces for each other to be in the wild spaces of grief, joy, and of connection through sound. We invite you to plug into the transformative power of collective grieving, collective listening, collective regeneration. Siegmar offers a sonic container to experience being shaken and connected together. Let us acknowledge the different grieves present: personal losses, climate grief, social injustices and human injustices, ecocides and genocides. The listening sessions are sound meditations for wandering together into a space where we do not need to be alone. Building on an eco-feminist practice of regeneration we want to sustain transformative quaking while asking: How can we be together otherwise.

Come as you are. All bodies are welcome. All grieves are welcome.

SIEGMAR ZACHARIAS was born in Romania and lives in Berlin. She is a performance artist and researcher, a trained death doula and she studies traditional plant medicine. At the intersection of art, radical pedagogy and activism, she works collaboratively learning from grieving. The work generates performances, immersive installations, encounters and durational projects that address generative ethical dynamics of transformation. Since 2016 she has been curating "Training for political imaginaries", 24hrs symposia where ecologies of artistic and social practice are shared. Together with Steve Heather, she developed the somacoustic listening sessions WAVES – listening towards social bodies as containers for collective grieving, in which the materiality of sound is explored on an intimate metabolic level.

Together with Shelley Etkin, Kitti Zsiga, and women in a post-migrant neighbourhood in Neuköln with ancestors from Turkey, Kurdistan, Syria, Iran, Jordan and Palestine they have developed the SocialBodyApothecary valuing the knowledges and resources stored in our bodies and lands, practicing making medicine together as a decolonial practice of resistance against structural violence.