Foundations in Cultural Somatics
Relational Education for Artists & Facilitators
Somatic Scribing is a contemporary social art with traditional roots that counters the monoculture of written English and its colonial stories of separation. When we visualize information about a living system (like a team, group, project or organization), we tell our story in a way that is spatial and relational. Laying out what we sense on paper helps us see patterns, habits, and cultural norms, how they shape us, and what we can do about it.
What does writing and the body have to do with social change?
All political, economic and cultural institutions use the body metaphor as a blueprint for organizational design - we have heads of state, arms of the military, birth of the nation. Visual storytellers who understand how our bodies function and how power plays out in our own bodies know how to visualize power in the collective body, and show people what can be done to shift oppression, leverage power, and transform culture.
In this Lab, we warmly welcome cultural practitioners in reclaiming the writing systems that documented our ancestors’ ways of knowing (epistemologies) through pictures, symbols, metaphors and myths that have been violently and systemically erased. We use embodied practices to move us beyond the colonial imaginary and the (white supremacist) worship of the written word, enlivening our learning and nourishing our systems as we align ourselves with the tools that will draw up new worlds within the old. This course illuminates how a framework of language justice can incorporate Somatic Scribing into your praxis.
Amidst global calls for artists to meet this moment with radical imagination, Somatic Scribing invites visual storytellers to ditch the master’s tools and instead craft visions of our culture with integrity to the balanced living systems we come from - systems that will guide what we imagine today for our shared future.
Changing how we write changes how we think.
The Course
Visual literacy requires both the practice of writing and the practice of reading. We need both roles to build cultural somatic fluency. In each session, all participants will have the opportunity to practice both of these complimentary skill-sets: Somatics practice to deepen our ability to “read” the social body, and a Scribing practice to develop or deepen “writing” skills by visually mapping the social body.
READING / Somatics
These practices are for comms leaders, facilitators, strategists, organizers, counselors, teachers, cultural workers, and people shaping cultural spaces who:
Want to widen your existing somatics practice to include the cultural soma (body)
Are decolonizing your approach to working with groups
Are seeking practice space with generative feedback to develop the skill of “reading the room”
Are interested in building out new content in the field of Cultural Somatics
Our primary work together will ask: “how can we learn about the state of our culture by feeling it through our own embodiments?” We will use embodied practices to observe our metabolic processes as we track our learnings about the cultural soma.
WRITING / Scribing
These practices are designed for artists, graphic recorders, cultural workers, visual storytellers, and people looking to cultivate these skills who:
Want to try on or deepen visual arts practice
Are seeking growth in your ability to hold space for group reflection and transformation
Want to refine an anti-colonial frame to your artistry, or bring more artistry to your anti-colonial framework
Are interested in contributing to the field of social arts
We are cultivating the skill of applying visual language tools that enhance group learning, cohesion and sensemaking. We will practice both live record-making and sharing reflections back to the group.
This cohort will gather across twelve weeks, tracing the arc of a body’s lifespan and exploring a theme for each session. Sessions are designed to be highly interactive, nourishing to our bodies, and fun! Our methods center experiential learning and attend to both individual and group development. Each session will include somatic practices, group discussion, games, and visual arts practice. No prior art or somatic experience is required but participants will be asked to keep artistic and embodied practices throughout the Lab.
In each session, we look at rhythms that reveal the parallels between the form and function of both physiological and social bodies:
Our Labor, Our Birth | labor movement, reproductive justice
Let’s All Just Take a Breath | breathing structures
Digestive Juices | microbiomes, consumerism, news feeds, farmworkers
In Circulation | water, blood, lymph, hormones, qi, memes, money
We’re a (Nervous) System | autonomic/sympathetic, interoception/proprioception, trauma, justice
Putting the Movement in the Movement | posturing, bones, muscle, connective tissue
Putting the Sensing back into Sense-making | 5+ senses, trauma pt. 2
Feeling Sick | Immunography, social naturopathy
The Bath | limpias, eugenics, spiritual hygiene
Rest!! | the crashout, napping, dream, restorative yin
Uses of the Erotic | Audre, pleasure, reproductive labor pt. 2
Holy Mother Death | sunsetting, dreampractice
We need to think in the language of interconnectedness.
The written language of interconnection is called scribing.
LOGISTICS & DETAILS
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Class is 2h/week and meets Wednesdays on the following dates:
Aug 19,Aug 26, Sept 2, Sept 9, Sept 16, Sept 23, Sept 30, Oct 7, Oct 14, Oct 21, Oct 28, Nov 4
Time: 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT / 9:30pm IST
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The Lab fees are based on calculations of the Lab team’s cost of labor for the organizing and coordinating of the Lab, valued at meeting our basic needs. We are also in the practice of redistributing a portion of our income as reparations, mutual aid, and other acts within the solidarity economy. (Please note that we will be discussing more transparently the topic of money as a case study in the flow of resources in our collective soma.)
Contributing $600 for participation would cover our costs at a living wage. We offer the following sliding scale for you to sit with and assess where you, your ancestors, and your current financial situation land:
$0 / Non-Monetary Exchange for Black, Indigenous and People of Color who consider this work to be reclaiming ancestral lifeways stolen by colonization, enslavement & genocide. This is not a scholarship. We believe descendants of these atrocities should never have to pay to access what is rightfully theirs. You are invited to exchange medicine of any kind for the labor of organizing this course.
$300 - $600 for folks from the global South, people from historically disenfranchised communities, low income/working class folks, people with less access to wealth (savings, investments, inheritance).
$600 - $1000 for folks from the global North, folks who identify as middle or upper class, people who have access to savings, investments, or inheritance. For people who have benefitted from wealth extraction, you might consider contributing generously at this level to support us in hosting cohort members reclaiming ancestral lifeways.
We are always willing to discuss with accepted participants how to make resource exchange accessible, including payment plans.
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CURATOR & HOST | As a cultural worker, Kate (Cielo) Morales’ work braids visual art, performance, ritual, and play to illuminate latent wisdom and power in the collective body. In 2022, they established the Somatic Scribing Lab where they teach scribing, cultural somatics, and ecoliteracy. Kate also hosts and produces the Somatic Scribing Podcast, directs Playlab - an intergenerational embodied research ensemble, and is a writer and convener of transnational conversations about queer pedagogy. At home Kate serves as board member and compost fairy of their co-housing community, and is most importantly a joyful parent in a QTBIPOC unschooling family.
COFACILITATION | Larissa Kaul (they/them) is a multidisciplinary Presence Artist infusing arts and culture with its original power; to spiritually feed people and Place. They are the creator of Mukta Reveal: The Play of Reality is Nature’s Sacred Striptease, an artform based in embodied research, high integrity play, and wild devotion. They have almost 20 years of facilitation experience, a background in Counseling, and over 10 years guiding ritual and ceremony. Larissa is mixed race (Southasian and European), non-binary living with chronic pain and health conditions. This delightful combo greatly influences how they design.
This course is open to people of all backgrounds across the world. It will center the voices of the Bodies of Culture that make up the global majority.
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A wide net of influences for this Lab include:
In addition to the weekly gatherings there will be many other ways to be in connection and collaboration:
Private Mighty Network group
1-on-1 cultural-animist somatics session
Guest lecturers/special topics
Invitation to attend live recording and Q&A of the Somatic Scribing podcast
Invitation to join the Somatic Scribing Lab (more below) upon completion of the course
All participants will be asked to keep a daily embodiment practice. In addition to our weekly meeting, you can expect to be in 2-3 hours per week of independent Lab play. Designed to be more resourcing and integrated than “homework,” an average week will give participants the option to choose from a host of somatic practices, guided artistic prompts, readings/podcasts, and sacred study.
Somatic Scribing Ecosystem
Foundations in Cultural Somatics is the third cycle of this course which began in 2021, with new, updated and refined material. It is the first of three Foundations in Somatic Scribing courses, with forthcoming courses in Ecological Literacy and Animist Storytelling, coming Spring/Fall 2027.
Participants may join The Somatic Scribing Lab upon completion of at least one foundations course. The Somatic Scribing Lab is a research and development hub for artists and facilitators in the field of visual practice. Forthcoming projects include an ancestral scribing archive, client data mapping, and ongoing development of embodied research methods.
While courses can be taken individually, all three Foundations courses plus a year of research in the Somatic Scribing Lab are designed to be a full masters’ level program.
Foundations in Cultural Somatics
We study the body to understand culture and how to shift it.
Foundations in Ecological Literacy
We study living systems to understand why nature organizes in patterns and how to apply them to cultural organizing.
Foundations in Animist Storytelling
Our ancestors tell us that stories are alive. We learn how to work with them not as tools, but as collaborators.
Somatic Scribing Lab
A container that holds ‘capstone’ projects, personal and collective research, and archival materials.
The Somatic Scribing Lab
The Somatic Scribing Lab is a hub and laboratory for politicized artists to transform the social art of graphic recording into an anti-colonial language justice framework. We teach somatic and ecological literacy to help artists, facilitators and movement leaders learn the pattern language of living systems and how to apply them to cultural knowledge production. Since 2021, The Somatic Scribing Lab has trained over 100 visual facilitators in bridging narrative visual art and embodied liberation, in addition to offering the work freely on The Somatic Scribing Podcast.
