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.