Alpine Ecosomatics: Kinesthetic Attunements and Living Feedbacks
A practice-based research workshop facilitated by Dr Raffaele Rufo as part of the Alpine Attunements: Bodies as Sensors Symposium Day, hosted by the Institute for the Culture of the Alps (IDKA), University of Lucerne.

Date: 12 November 2026
Location: Kapuzinerkresse Kloster, Altdorf, Uri, Switzerland

Description

This practice-based research workshop approaches attunement not as a one-directional tuning of the body to the Alpine environment, but as a reciprocal field of sensing — where bodies sense and are sensed in return. Ecosomatic practice here becomes a passage into a more-than-human experience of perception, working at the threshold where the human is no longer perceived as separate from the ecosystem, but as a porous and relational participant within it.

Through guided practices across forest, garden, walking routes, and meditation space, participants engage movement, breath, and touch as primary modalities of perception, while entering processes of listening with the Earth and sensing with plants. Presence, proprioception, and shared improvisational movement open a distributed field of sensing shaped by kinesthetic, tactile, and affective processes.

Within this field, participants explore perceptual shifts and passages — encountering both the possibilities and the limits of reorienting perception beyond the human sensorium. This involves approaching a vegetalisation of the senses: not as imitation, but as a speculative, embodied inquiry into how perception can be researched by allowing the ways plants sense, breathe, and relate within their ecosystems to inform our own modes of attention and presence. This plant-based paradigm reframes perception as atmospheric, relational, and co-emergent. Atmosphere is not only perceived but co-created, as bodies and environment continuously modulate one another.

Within this process, feedback is understood as a fundamental biological dynamic through which life unfolds — a continuous circulation of sensing, response, adaptation, and transformation. Rather than occurring at the end, feedback operates throughout the workshop as an embodied, participatory practice of expression and translation. Sensory, affective, and kinaesthetic experiences are continuously shared and reconfigured through movement scores, spatial constellations, relational gestures, and moments of reflection. In this way, sensing becomes response, response reshapes perception, and experience circulates as shared, situated knowledge — modelling ecosomatic practice as a regenerative feedback system transferable to broader ecological and institutional contexts.