Ecosomatic Awareness
The body is the portal for transformation and regeneration
In an accelerating digital age shaped by endless stimulation, attention extraction, and manufactured needs, the body is increasingly pulled between over-activation and anaesthetization—caught in cycles of consumption that erode presence, relationality, and our capacity to respond to ecological and social crises.
Ecosomatic practice emerges as a counter-movement, reclaiming the body as a living site of perception, relation, creativity, and care through which embodied participation is catalysed, opening transformative pathways of alliance with one another and the more-than-human world—forests, other animals, and vibrant matter—beyond fixed or formalised frameworks.
Ecosomatic awareness unfolds as a sensory and poetic exploration in movement: a dance with inner and outer ecologies that restores perception and deepens our engagement with the places and territories we inhabit. As a practice-portal, it cultivates listening, attunement, and becoming-with, fostering relational presence and offering transformative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting through embodied participation.
What is Ecosomatics?
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What is Ecosomatics? *
Ecosomatics (from “oikos,” home or habitat, and “soma,” the living body in its entirety) is a rapidly growing field of practices that is spreading internationally by integrating artistic, educational, holistic and therapeutic knowledge (geared primarily toward sensory experience, dance, choreography and performance) with ecological, social and cultural knowledge (geared toward community and land re-generation). Ecosomatic art practices are set to impact broader areas of society such as education, health, social work, urban planning, ecology, and culture.
Practicing Ecosomatic Awareness
Ecosomatic Awareness is a movement-based sensorial, relational, and socially engaged art practice researched by Raffaele Rufo (PhD) during over twenty years of experience across Europe, Senegal and Australia. Ecosomatic Awareness facilitates personal transformation and ecosocial (re-)generation through listening with earth, seeding human-nature reciprocity and learning the art of commoning. Through with-nessing, interpenetration and attunement, these processes evolve in a more-than-human partnership across the vegetal, animal and mineral worlds.
Engaging the experience of the embodied self as connected and continuous with an embodied nature requires exploring and affirming the value of movement and sensoriality as key gateways into knowing and being. Through ecosomatic practice we come to realise our awareness as an embodied relational process embedded in the radically larger (and smaller) movements of the earth. This experience of reciprocity opens up a deeper and broader perceptual ground to engage the relation between body and earth as a source of inspiration, a mode of cultural resistance and a gentle act of repair of the connective tissues of life and matter in their many forms.
Slow Study Course (Online)
Slow Study Course (Online)
Explore Ecosomatics
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Ecosomatics: Introduction
EXPERIENCING BODY AND ENVIRONMENT AS MUTUAL EXTENSIONS
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Ecosomatic Dance Practice
VEGETALIZING THE SENSES AND REAWAKENING THE ANIMAL BODY
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Ecosomatic Artistic Research
HUMANS, TREES AND THE RECIPROCITY OF PERCEPTION
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Ecosomatics: Roots & Trajectories
URBAN ENCOUNTERS AND BROADER ALLIANCES FOR LIVEABLE FUTURES
Join Participatory Projects & Networks
Semina Mundi: Generative Gathering for Seeding the Ecosomatic Community in Italy
IFEEA: International Forum for Eco-Embodied Arts
Genius Loci: International Symposium of Ecosomatic Arts
La Selva: Ecological Arts and Ecosomatic Residency
Listen Up
An short interview for ‘In the Mouth of the Wolf’ Podcast on Ecosomatics and the Genius Loci Symposium. Dr Raffaele Rufo talks with Marco Adda about how ecosomatics can become not only a personal practice, but also a cultural and ecological one: a way of inhabiting the world that weaves together care, creativity, and awareness.
Read Raffaele Rufo’s Publications & Interviews on Ecosomatics
Read essays, interviews, journal articles, video articles and more on ecosomatic practice principles and philosophies.
Watch Videos of Ecosomatic Practices
ecosomatic dance practices | ecosomatic performative actions | ecosomatic residencies | ecosomatic workshops | ecosomatic video essays
Quotes from Dr Raffaele Rufo
“I believe that the ecosomatic arts can work as a catalyst for ecological awareness and social responsiveness. This involves, first of all, a return to perception and the recognition of the wounds of our destructive cultural heritage. This is a necessary step towards (re-)gaining the collective ability to grieve for ecological losses and challenge the destructive consequences of colonial / capitalist / extractivist practices of ecosocial destruction and individual alienation.” (Raffaele Rufo)
“My work with movement, textual and audiovisual practices aims to reconfigure the relation with the nonhuman and matter by rediscovering the continuum between life and death and the ritualistic dimension of human experience, exploring the tension between the need to connect with roots and the drive to reach towards the unfamiliar and the unknown, and revaluing the interpenetration of urban, natural and archeological places and landscapes.” (Raffaele Rufo)
“My long term goal is to create networks and platforms for exchange and to disseminate tools, processes and perspectives of eco-somatic embodiment which support the development of translocal communities of practice and collaborative ways of inhabiting the Earth with other beings and forms of life and with vibrant matter. I aim to promote the role of dancers, movers and other somatic and eco-embodied artists more as grassroots agents of ecological consciousness and cultural change.” (Raffaele Rufo)