The breath we share:

embodied and creative practices for a living and dying world

(working title)

In 2022 art.earth welcomed more than 180 international practitioners to interrogate somatic practices and how they might foster embodied ecological awareness. Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human embraced multiple fields of thought, practice and research, embodying bridges across the human, plant and animal divide. Learn more at performativities.info

Three years on, the symposium’s core issues feel ever more pertinent and urgent. Despite all we know, the world seems only to double down on a collective environmental apathy, reinforcing the putative supremacy of humankind above other life forms (such an old, old story). Narratives of separation from the more than human world privilege systems based on extraction and exploitation, leaving many paralyzed, indifferent or just stunned into submission.

We know, viscerally, that eco-embodied arts practices can melt the distinctions between the felt and the reasoned (an artificial dichotomy in any case), leading us towards a perpetual and interdependent continuum. It’s now commonly recognised that scientific evidence and intellectual invocations alone fail to move us to act – we need to feel physically and emotionally what is at stake. But we seem to be more estranged from the natural world than ever.

It’s been more than two decades since Louv posited the notion of Nature Deficit Disorder: a codifying of humanity’s growing alienation from the living, breathing world and the felt understanding of a shared planetary materiality and corporeality. What can we do to develop and promote a culture of care, reciprocity and healing in a world that seems to be carelessly drifting towards cruelty, separation and anxiety? More pertinently, how can we nudge felt knowledge and entanglement towards responsible, resilient and sustainable action?

To expand the reach and dissemination of somatically-informed practices and research including artistic processes that speak with and to the more-than-human, seems increasingly imperative in view of the growing schism between the human and natural worlds. This book sets out to reflect on the emergence of new practices and knowledge production, build bridges to other disciplines and thought pathways, define and expand boundaries, and make a real contribution to the sustainability, resilience, vigour and credibility of this field.

Our invitation

So, we call on you.

Reflecting the hybridity of our 2022 symposium, your challenge is to create an object of words and images that is not only beautiful and poetic, but also radical and potent. The somatic and our relationship to it must, at least in part, exist outside the confines of the pages of this book, and also outside of what we might think of as somatic. We therefore welcome and strongly invite all creative, academic, philosophical and scientific thought and practice to this endeavour.

Please, inspire us with ways to challenge publishing orthodoxy without turning our backs on the written page: bring us still imagery, audio & video works, poetry, scores, drawings – always with a core of intellectual rigour and experimentation. Of course, we also welcome exciting academic texts. More on submission guidelines below.

How art.earth Books are made

art.earth Books has been publishing since 2017. There are no financial resources to support our publications; we combine our in-house expertise with the generosity of guest writers and editors and partners.

All input is unpaid. As an imprint, we support the cost of book design, the initial print run and handling sales. Proceeds are used to support additional print runs and the seeding of new publications. Marketing is a collaborative effort from everyone who has a stake in the individual publication. Dr Richard Povall is the Executive Editor.

From the initial shortlist we work with those selected to flesh out their ideas into something more substantive – some authors require little support but those with less experience may need help to bring their ideas to the page. We have no proscriptions on length – ideas must have the space they need to flourish and be heard. As a creative practitioner you may feel daunted by words and by linguistic fluency, but do not let that stop you from sending us your proposal.

Our publications are published in English, have ISBN records and are lodged with the UK Book Repositories. Read more about the imprint at artearthbooks.com

How to submit your proposal

Start with the submission form. You will be asked to outline your idea in no more than 400 words and to tell us a little about yourself.

If your proposal is not word-centred we still need you to fill in the submission form; you’ll still need to use words, but you can also send us to up to three weblinks.

Shortform

If you can say what you need to say in one page (our format is 210mm x 210mm) we encourage you to submit a shortform proposal. This may be a single image, a single sentence, anything that will fit into a single page. Click the box on the submission form.