In face of the global context posed by catastrophes, crises, and climate emergencies, Sensitive Territories is a platform of research-creation projects in arts and sciences that assembles artist-researchers, scientists, and local communities to work together performatively and collaboratively in the investigation and construction of dialogues between the fields of arts, society and environmental issues.
Created in 2014 by Brazilian artist Walmeri Ribeiro, – based on Performance theories and practices, especially from Performance as Research (PaR) – the project aims to (re)think the creation and fruition of artistic practices, investigating ethico-political-aesthetic modes of producing art, as well as social and environmental engagements of arts to address contemporary challenges. Believing in the political dimension as much as in the sensitive potentiality of art practices, the project acts in the construction of affective fields to encourage ways of imagining, dreaming, and acting in the construction of other worlds, of new and possible ways of existence and coexistence among humans and non-humans entities.
Developed through Laboratories of research and artistic creation, the actions are guided by concepts such as emergency, processuality, experience, porous body, embodied Knowledge, embodiment, and emplacement. Departing from performative, immersive, and collaborative actions that unfold into performances, site-specific interventions, visual and sound pieces, videoinstallations, and publications.
For some years, our research and creation has been focused on operating in territories that are in ruins, intensely devastated, polluted, and impacted by the modern "civilization" project, centered on extractivism and progress, which "blinds all vital sensorial organs and creates insensitive bodies, accustomed to violence" (Aráoz, 2020).
How, then, to re-sensitize our bodies? How to create ways of living (not just surviving), to imagine and dream amidst the open veins of the Anthropocene? How to render our bodies "porous bodies" (Ribeiro,2021), activating all their potency to act facing contemporary crises?
With these questions, our actions are currently focused on the investigation of regenerating
