Somatics Manifest Against Deportation
Somatics Manifest Against Deportation
Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 15:30
Location: SJES017 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
The Somatic Laboratory - latinx memories is a long-term research project led by Paula Montecinos and Flavia Pinheiro in partnership with Papaya Kuir and Lectorat of the Academy of Theater and Dance of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. The project seeks to investigate how somatics can become an anti-racist and trans*feminist practice and support healing in relation to racialized and exclusionary traumas of members of the trans and queer Latinx community.
The Somatic Laboratory - latinx memories works with memories and experiences encarved in tissues, movement patterns and bodily responses, through different modes of touch, image-making, listening, sounding, broadening up the relation between perception, sensation and action, expanding possibilities of feeling-thinking and imagining more liberated futurities.
In this text we aim to reflect into the intersectional approaches that considers different backgrounds of social, race and gender inequalities in participants, engaging a critical perspective on the white US-Eurocentric foundation embedded in somatic practice. Through the collaboration with Papaya Kuir, the project investigates how somatics might be transformed if it is practiced for and by the trans and queer Latinx community – with a particular focus on asylum seekers and migrants in the Netherlands.
We will interweave critical and experiential reflection linked to the manifesto ‘Somatics Against Deportation’, unfolding the aims of a fugitive practice occurring simultaneously within the institutions and fleeing from it. With this text we seek to convey an understanding on the political implications on the ethics of care and to propose a framework to better understand how pedagogies of reexistance and repossession could take form.
The Somatic Laboratory - latinx memories works with memories and experiences encarved in tissues, movement patterns and bodily responses, through different modes of touch, image-making, listening, sounding, broadening up the relation between perception, sensation and action, expanding possibilities of feeling-thinking and imagining more liberated futurities.
In this text we aim to reflect into the intersectional approaches that considers different backgrounds of social, race and gender inequalities in participants, engaging a critical perspective on the white US-Eurocentric foundation embedded in somatic practice. Through the collaboration with Papaya Kuir, the project investigates how somatics might be transformed if it is practiced for and by the trans and queer Latinx community – with a particular focus on asylum seekers and migrants in the Netherlands.
We will interweave critical and experiential reflection linked to the manifesto ‘Somatics Against Deportation’, unfolding the aims of a fugitive practice occurring simultaneously within the institutions and fleeing from it. With this text we seek to convey an understanding on the political implications on the ethics of care and to propose a framework to better understand how pedagogies of reexistance and repossession could take form.