slow digestion ROTATION Protocol 02

We invite you to re-visit the Soil Wunderkammer (tree-pit) from Protocol 01 that made you feel the most uneasy, uncomfortable or curious. 

This protocol asks you to consider how the physicality of your own body affects how you observe, sense and process your tree pit fieldwork. The protocol invites you to understand your body as porous and intermeshed with the tree-pit environment, proposing your digestive ecosystem—your gut flora—as an extension of and enrichment for your visual gaze.

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Participate: slow digestion ROTATION Protocol 02

Go to the tree pit from Protocol 01 that made you feel the most uneasy, uncomfortable or curious.

Arrive. Stand still. Start with feeling. Bring your attention to your feet with your breath and allow what you notice from the ground texture to travel through your soles of your feet up to your vertical uprightness.

 

Activate your digestion ecosystem to augment your vision. Bring your hands to your stomach. Breath into that area, noticing how your breath moves your stomach, and also the ecosystem inside it, where digestion occurs. How do the bacteria in your stomach and gut respond? Keep your hand on your stomach to help you stay focused on the connection between inside and outside.  Slowly allow your digestion system to become an extension of your eyes. Trace what you see in soil and on the ground around the tree pit, moving your gaze in response to the movement of your gut flora. How do the beings in your gut flora affect how you see? Amplify these movements.

Root and Rotate in place. Very slowly rotate in place. Keep the “gut flora eye extension” activated as you rotate. Pause to rest. Then continue. Rotate a full 360 degrees. Use this process to slowly create a panoramic pan of all the networks of interaction you witness with your “gut flora eye extension.” Do this on each of the four corners of the tree pit, north, south, east and west.

 

Document your rotation: Use a camera to document the experience of your rotational fieldwork. Try making a panorama through your phone camera or using a collage of multiple images. Share your fieldnotes in an audio recording: what did you discover and digest with the gaze of your gut flora? Upload an image here and email your audio recording to contact@multispecies.care. (include the subject line “protocol 02”).

Responses

  • Agoston, from Gellért Hill, Budapest
  • andrea from Lenapehocking land, Brooklyn, NY
  • Ellie, Mohican land, Troy, NY, USA

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