Chloe Calderon Chotrani (b. 1992, Manila, Philippines)
Chloe is a queer Filipina, Sindhi, and Singaporean movement artist, somatic therapist, and embodiment facilitator. She responds to the poly-crisis by advocating for ancestral ancient animistic practices through her labor of bridging embodied wisdom to communities. Her work is rooted in de-conditioning colonialist-capitalist destructive ways of living, by prioritising a politics of care, community creation, and working with and within the Global South.
She works with people who experience the wound of separation between the mind-body-soul, which may come in the forms of chronic stress, anxiety, disease, pain, inflammation, and burn out. Drawing upon mature experience in world movement arts, complementary medical health, trauma sensitive facilitation, bodywork modalities, and earth-based wisdom. Along side, holding relational, cultural, and ecological sensitivity in its highest regard. She works with a belief that the deeper we can connect to our bodies, the more we can connect to the earth.
More on Chloe here: http://bodyas.earth/chloe
http://instagram.com/bodyas.earth
Lisa Xiu (b. 1978, Ede, The Netherlands)
Lisa is born to Vietnamese-Chinese boat refugees and was stateless for her first seven years, until her family based in in Amsterdam, where she was raised. She straddles the balance between her roots in East Asia while being culturally raised in The Netherlands. She moved to Singapore in 2017.
She is passionate about conscious tourism, food and beverage, hospitality, and web design and development. She has been moulded by entrepreneurship for 25 years in luxury retail, multiple F&B businesses, and web development as a bridge to translate information effectively. Along side, she pursued documentary journalism photography. Lisa volunteers frequently with NGOs and non-profits such as TEDx, Red Cross, Aidha, and Dutch-Chinese organisations.
Currently, Lisa collaborates by creating the supporting structures of the undercurrents of Body as Earth; as a co-facilitator through offering sound scapes during workshops, producing international retreats and events, and translating this work through digital presence. Creatively, Lisa confronts the difficulty of partial hearing loss and has found piano, singing bowls, and other healing instruments to be a deeply supportive part of her journey.
She holds the grounds for a more inclusive and intentional way of life through her boundless curiosity for the world.
More on Lisa here: http://instagram.com/lisaomomuro
Animismo is a longer-term project that aims to revive our understanding of ancestral animistic wisdom through immersive practices such as deep listening, embodied archiving, and localised research. The project is motivated by the poly-crisis of capitalism and colonialism, which is responsible for the catastrophic climate change that we are currently experiencing. The Islands of the South (Austronesia) are particularly vulnerable to this change, and one of the most pressing issues is the displacement of native and indigenous communities due to the relentless focus on profit over respect for ancestral land and its people. This has led to cultural amnesia and the loss of cultural stories, songs, sensibilities, and stability of the islands, its waters, and its inhabitants.
Animismo seeks to address these issues by inviting us to remember the ancient and emergent wisdom that is often buried due to modernity and its perceived developments. Animsmo seeks to reconnect with the belief that all living things have a soul, countering the Anthropocentric notion of human superiority. The name Animismo derives from the Tagalog words "Ani" which means harvest, and "Mismo", which means self. Animismo is akin to harvesting the depths of our own selves, to tapping into the soul of the world, the Anima Mundi.
Research questions
What are the emergent animistic practices that are necessary to confront the crisis we are in?
What are the stories of the islands (Riau archipelago) that want to be heard, sung, and spoken?
How can we listen deeper and harder to the more than human world?How do we balance being a guest and host on this living planet?
How can sacred activism play a part in artistic practice?
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Embodied Landscapes aims to harmonise the connection between the body and mind through movement.
This workshop invites participants to release tension, manage stress, and conclude with a sound immersion to restore the body's innate intelligence. Through movement, we'll work with the spine, which is the home of our nervous system. By loosening the fluidity around the spine (cerebro-spinal fluid), we allow the nervous system to return to homeostasis. From there, we will flow into guided improvisation, allowing for free expression, which can lead to releasing held or compounded tension.
The facilitators are trauma-aware and assure accessibility to movement for all bodies.
This workshop is hosted by Body as Earth, with facilitation by Chloe and soundscapes by Lisa.
Deep Time is a practice of storytelling, deep listening, and collective dreaming. Through a talking circle that welcomes stories of our ancestors of blood, land, and spirit, followed by a gentle and slow practice to loosen the body, we will enter a guided restful journey to achieve a collective state of dreaming. Amidst the backdrop of modernity that often requires and demands the violence of rushing, this workshop invites us to slow down time and allow an unfolding of the inherent wisdom stored in our bodies.
Our time on Nikoi Island was spent mostly attuning. Attuning is one of the core qualities of a somatic and body-centric process. It leads from listening. Once we fully arrived at the rhythm of the island, we foraged for materials, recorded soundscapes of the biodiverse ecology, and kept a steady movement and recording practice without much expectation of outcome.
A practice of animismo is acknowledging the soul of a place. We do that by entering meditative states and utilising tools of fire making, ritual offering, and respectful greeting with the land and ourselves as guests. In this spirit, we can then create, by being informed by the soul of the place.
Our exploration on Nikoi Island culminated in a short dance film, which we look forward to sharing in its time. We also created two small visual offerings for two of the trees, one by the South entrance of Jetty 2 and the other by the West side towards the ocean. These offerings, shaped by a Filipino symbol of fertility and made with foraged materials, powdered plants, ash, and tobacco, were our way of expressing and acknowledging the soul of the land — animismo.
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Ubah Rumah is an art residency and archive inspired by stories of our region.
