Embodied
DEMOCRACY

[Practicing Interdependency: cultivating democratic relationships with humans and other-then-human species]

Ongoing research project on embodied practices that foster the rise of democratic encounters, spaces, and interrelationships, through the lenses of Ecosomatics & Somatic Architecture: bodily and spatial awareness for psychological, social, and political growth.

A 6-month-residency, Fresh A.I.R., by URBAN NATION foundation in Berlin, and funded by Stiftung Berliner Leben, I have been working on the development of practices that grow a sense of democracy within the human body from the perspective of ECO-Somatic Architecture: the immersive multisensory experience between bodies and lived or imagined environments.

The occasion for the development of this project was the intense and violent police interventions in public spaces during the COVID lockdowns in Greece. The violation of the human right to breathe was exceeding the typical safety measures, revealing a shifting point of abusive power in the paradigm of Greek governance, which is self-called DEMOCRACY.

The idea of this project was born as an impulsive response to "how can someone resist the absurdity of fake-democracies"?

How can we re-claim what is good for our own bodies in times of absurd measures and governments that can't logically judge when someone is a criminal or just searching for a space to breathe?