On Friday October 4th, ARIAS’s Care Ecologies group in collaboration with DAS Publishing and de Nieuwe Dans Bibliotheek, hosted author Daisy Hildyard, choreographer Catalina Insignares and dramaturg Tamara Antonejivic for an exchange of artistic practices.

HIGH SHINE is a collaborative writing project that started during the pandemic, when Catalina and Tamara were an ocean away from each other. They developed a method for working together, based on Tamara’s writing — exploring the role of text in collaboration — and Catalina’s psychic and sensorial body practice — that seeks to communicate with the invisible.

The writing of Daisy Hildyard is in a language that draws attention to presences beyond the shortfall of words; life lived through the slow emergencies and violences of climate change, weaving into one relational body — the family of foxes, the river, the man, the plastic cup, the tree, the whale — the self and the Earth.

In a two-fold event the morning was led by Catalina, who shared with the participants her psychic and sensorial body practice that seeks to communicate with the invisible. Working in pairs, somatic exercises – and selected text fragments that Tamara and Daisy took turns in reading – led us to become sensitive to the landscapes of our bodies – visceral, relational, ecological – all entangled. At the end, a nourishing sense of having made a sensory and emotional journey throughout lingered.

In the evening HIGH SHINE stood central in an intimate book-launch at San Serriffe. The petite publication is a collaborative project between Catalina’s work and Tamara’s exploration of the role of text in collaboration. The result is a fictional text that captures artistic practice indirectly, like a score that has to be read and performed to unlock it. Daisy did ‘dance’ with it – responding through her writings that draw attention to (all) life lived through climate change and its slow emergencies.

Daisy Hildyard’s recent works are published by Fitzcarraldo editions. If you want to keep informed about Care Ecologies activities and events or want to participate please contact: nienke.scholts@arias.amsterdam.