Einen Platz zum Landen finden: Erdung

The »Video Tutorial #1 On finding a place to land: Grounding« looks at tools for negotiating the landing at a possible place: If we can’t believe in globalization anymore, nor in defensive nationalism, what is our territory to dwell in? We are floating in between directions of politics, mindsets, crisis and urgencies.

How to land? Well, Bruno Latour, in »Down to Earth«, says that we can land »by two complementary movements that modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to the soil on the one hand, becoming attached to the world on the other.« This is a tension that we will come back to more often in the following tutorials.

But for now: How to attach oneself to the soil? From a somatic sense this struggle reminds me of grounding – being aware of gravity, of the ground that allows my body to rise up, to be heavy in some and light in other parts, to be stable and reach out helps to localize my position, my substance in a particular space. By giving time to sense the ground and by resting consciously we awake our senses. On a somatic level, the contradiction of being focused on a passive, self–centred sensation and to be actively open towards the external might already be solved by a co-dependency: By intending to ground ourselves we are also rising, moving, lifting – our curiosity can grow by itself. (Maybe this approach assumes that we have to »find« ourselves first before we can opens up to the world. I do not claim this to be an authentic universal truth – it is just a tool, a possibility and a playful imagination.)

Enjoy the Grounding!

Mira Hirtz

With special thanks to Franziska Böhm and Kate Brown.