Climate Feelings

A workshop for processing feelings about the climate crisis

This workshop provides a space to process our feelings about the climate crisis and an artistic action to reclaim the city, raising awareness about the climate crisis.

We will use tools derived from two methods – Active Listening and bodywork following the Pantarei Approach – in order to jointly process the big emotions that the climate crisis creates in us: for example fear, powerlessness, hopelessness, rage. We will then transform the emotions into a source of connection – with ourselves and others –, of clarity in our vision, of power and action.

The workshop will culminate into an artistic action. We will write short sentences about our feelings on paper stripes and paste them up in the streets of Berlin. The sentences will be short and personal descriptions covering three different topics:

1. In what way does my awareness of the climate crisis affect me?
2. What does it mean to me to be an activist?
3. What do I love about my environment, about life, about the planet, and why? Which places in nature, which people, which landscapes, which values are motivating me and are leading me through my life and my struggles?

Some of the sentences may come out more factual, some others more abstract. All of them will be honest and direct. Our vision is that the city will be pasted up everywhere with our feelings around the climate crisis and our love and hope for all life. These feelings are out there anyway and all the time, even if the scream is muted and our society seems paralysed. We will make this collective scream visible in a creative, poetic way.

Methods

During the workshop we will use two methods:

Active Listening is based on the interaction with other individuals within a defined time frame, offering each other full attention and listening to each other without interruption. Any expressions of emotions are welcomed and supported as a part of a natural healing process. The listener never refers to what was said to anyone outside the session. These sessions release tensions that interfere with people’s thinking and functioning.

Bodywork after the Pantarei Approach. Somatic bodywork is a holistic practice based on movement, touch and verbal communication that supports people to reconnect to and unify our body, feelings, thinking. We will use some bodywork exercises to reconnect to our vision in life, to the love for ourselves and other living beings, to mother earth, to get clarity about our challenges and find our strength and motivation to keep loving & fighting.

Structure of the workshop

The workshop consists of two parts:

1. 10–13h: We meet indoors, do the biographic work, formulate the sentences, write them down, we photograph them (in case we might want to print more copies in the future).
2. 13–14:30h: We paste the sentence up in the streets. We will use glue made from flour and water which is completely organic.

Who we are

We are a female* street performance collective/open platform in Berlin called Women* Making Art in Public Space that connects dance, play, theatre, music, visual arts and social activism. Our focus is to play, question and change the interactions of bodies (human and non-human) in the public space. We come from different artistic backgrounds, we share an intersectional queer feminist perspective and practices of embodiment. Women* Making Art in Public Space has been created in 2019 by Diana Sirianni and Susi Rosenbohm, artists, somatic explorers and socially engaged women living in Berlin. www.womenmakingartinpublicspace.com

Registration

If possible, register your participation via email.