Netherlands Film Academy | November 29th, 2023

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Grammars map relationships between words. They structure our sentences, reflexively. Quietly, quite unnoticed, they guide habits and patterns in how words relate. Not only on a page, but in words spoken. In thinking. In sensing. In imagining. Grammars shape ways of relating in everyday encounters and perceptions.

Artist and researcher, ro heinrich, shared her practice through a film screening, embodied listening, and word sensing through our relations with Earth and inhabiting a care ecology of words that offers ways of being-in-relation. 

Imagining all the layers underneath our feet, the group envisioned their connection to time and space through a grounding exercise led by ro. Followed by a presentation on the “grammars of separability” and a writing exercise, participants were introduced to the significance of languaging; of language as something active and a form of relationality. 

This workshop offered a reminder that words are alive. Travelling through times and tongues, words hold stories. They turn and change. They move, and can move and change things. It asked, what becomes un-thinkable, un-imaginable, within these structures? How might a relation- and process-oriented language, a verb-based language, enable different ways of being in relation  — with Earth and different living beings within and around us? A language of being in-becoming with, in-relation with, in-transition with…, …, …