URBAN ROOTS

The roots of my ecosomatic practice and thinking are in the felt, touch-based and movement-led experience of waiting, listening to and witnessing the presence of trees around me in a small town in the periphery of Milan. I began with a project called “Sensing with Trees” which then led me to articulate the possibility of being “danced by the tree”. This is a form of ecosomatic embodiment in which we are not only sensing, touching and dancing with trees; we are also becoming conscious somatically that we are also being sensed, touched and danced by their presence. So the roots of my ecosomatic practice are in this perceptual shift which announces reciprocity as the structure of a more-than-human perception.

The meaning of these first ecosomatic experiments is connected with the story of my “forced” return to Italy from Melbourne (Australia) after having been denied the visa for my children because they were born with a genetic disease. The Australian government ruled out the possibility of investing resources to cure them and we had no other choice but to leave the country. We left in time so we would not be expelled. That was a traumatic return. I had lost my professional and social sense of identity after nearly 8 years spent in Australia doing a PhD and developing social and artistic networks and practices as a tango dancer and theatre practitioner and as an artistic researcher.

The roots of my ecosomatic movement practice are in the somatic breath, touch and movement processes and in the extension and deepening of improvisational movement and dance as a structure to conduct long and ritualistic encounters with trees and their ecosystem. But these roots also tied up with finding the courage to recognise my alienation as a source of creativity and hope. I had daily encounters with the trees of my little town outside Milan for a period of six months. Every day was a discovery. A different somatic connection with the human body emerged which is also a connection with the land and with trees who are the main vehicle of the mystery of life on our planet. I still refer to this initial work as foundational because it brings me back to the basics of ecosomatic practice: wandering in movement, lying under a tree, grounding with a tree, shaping into the branches. These are not simply exercises but gateways into another way of perceiving the body and the world as something more-than-human.

The climax of this urban reconciliation with trees happened throughout the long Covid pandemic when I started to imagine or, better, I needed to imagine and create the category of dance as an ecosomatic practice and of dancers as agents of ecological consciousness to be able to still see the purpose of dance practice in contemporary society: a society that has lost even the most basic understanding of the importance of a touch-based connection, of a felt-sense of the other not only for the formation of identity but as the affirmation of the centrality of relation for our life. The intuition of being “danced by the tree” is an outcome or re-engaging and reinventing my relationship with the partner and shared improvisational dance of tango and contact improvisation in a more-than-human landscape. How can we have a felt sense of connection with what is not human and has been excluded by our colonial culture from the realm of experience for so many years? This raises a question which is valid for the vast majority of Western populations: How can we still be with trees in the city, in urban contexts where we and trees are separated from their kins to live a solitary life just to please humans and their plans and designs? The experience of solitary trees in cities reminds me of the experience of people with disabilities in our society: it is so difficult for them to feel part of a forest.

BROADER ALLIANCES

The second important process through which my ecosomatic practice has been taking roots is the departure from Milan with my family to live in Rome. Developing an ecosomatic practice required finding the courage and seizing the opportunity to move closer to where I could find nature and I could feel more at home and more connected with my roots. Rome is not where my Italian ancestors come from. My most direct cultural and geographical heritage is tied with the southern region of Campania, in the province of Salerno and particularly the area of Cilento. This is where Virgil had the Latin hero Aeneas and his boat crew landed after their long adventure started in Troy and before arriving in Rome. In this same coastal region of Cilento the Greeks had much earlier founded one of their key colonies in Southern Italy outside of Sicily.

We left Milan in 2021 and moved not near the ancient part of Rome where a tourist would imagine. We moved to Ostia, in the periphery of the periphery, as the poet Pier Pasolo Pasolini (who was murdered in the slams of Ostia in the 70’s) used to call it. Ostia is located on the coast of Rome within the rural basin which has always been pivotal to the growth and development of Rome. Ostia is located where the river Tiber flows into the Thyrrenian sea. This periphery of the larger metropolitan city of Rome overlaps the very large Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast sanctioned by the Italian Government in 1996. Ostia is a suburb of Rome and yet it counts over 200,000 inhabitants with one of the youngest populations in Italy. is a place full of contradictions where social and cultural degradation coexist with civic, educational and ecological and artistic activism with pockets of community effervescence. where hundreds of thousands of trees live. Most of them are tall, majestic, centenary, seapines, planted there for producing pine nuts by noble families in the 17th century and then planted again in the new urban part of the city in the 60’s and 70’s to reclaim the marshland. This territory used to be a swamp and back in geological times the sea used to cover a greater part of what now is the coast. This clarification is important because trees are a key reason why I personally felt attracted by this land. Urban parks and urban forests are not comparable for biodiversity and impact on human activities to parks and forests in rural areas. In the five years since I moved to Ostia I witnessed both the signs of death and regeneration of nearly 200,000 hectares of forest burned in the great fire of 2000 and the mass death of around 50,000 sea pines, killed by an insect imported from North America. This has greatly marked my embodied ecological consciousness and the nature of my ecosomatic practice. The romanticised idea of nature I had inherited from my urban childhood has waned away. Nature is death as much as life. Indeed, nature is about the life-death-life process continuing despite whatever human beings try to do in order to protect themselves from death. My key role in the artistic and educational community here in Ostia so far has been to try to foreground and advocate the role of trees as members of the cultural communities and to advance the alliance with trees as a necessary step of regeneration.

In Rome my practice of sensing with trees has taken the new explicit trajectory of a practice of mourning with trees. This turned out to be also a more particular and autobiographical return to the mourning practices of my ancestors and in particular a rediscovery of their ancient Greek heritage of mourning rituals of singing laments for the dead. My work on sensing, touching and moving with trees was complemented by a work on composing and performing laments as collective songs mobilised through embodied rituals to weave the relation between life and death and allow the letting go of the loss one is faced with - the ecological loss as well as the loss of community ties we are facing in this difficult age. I have spent at least a couple of years riding my bike across the territory of Ostia and gathering, collecting the eco-material remains of dead trees felled for safety reasons. This materic, embodied, somatic connection with both living and dead trees slowly turned the witnessing of the mass death of sea pines into a gateway to revalue and reinterpret the importance of death and mourning in my own Southern Italian culture. I used these eco-materials to offer ecosomatic workshops to dancers and artists on how to gather around the rediscovery of the rest of nature and ritualise a funeral for trees as a regenerative practice also for humans. I also took children and young people and also old people to the forest in embodied, sensuous and imaginative ways to experience first-hand the ecological wound of the mass death of sea pines while offering them an opportunity to value the central importance of trees in their life. This type of ecosomatic pedagogical practice and facilitation challenges the standard form of human socialization to help people access the possibility of having a felt sense of a connection with place and memories of the connection with land which our contemporary consumerist society is trying to make inaccessible.

Another important layer of how this ecosomatic return to perception amounted also to a rediscovery of the relation with the land of my ancestors is in the practice of tending and caring for the rewilding of the piece of natural reserve which surrounds my little apartment inside an old farmhouse in the middle of cultivated fields of Ostia Antica. Since I moved to Ostia I have tried to suspend judgment on what I as a powerful human should do to the plants and animals around me so they can have more time to do their course without many obstacles. I have spent a lot of time observing the life of plants, doing very little. This annoyed most of my neighbours who were used to just clearing and cutting the field when plants overgrow. This guardianship was coupled with a slow tuning with the practice of biological gardening which I have inherited from my mother’s family. This observation has taken me to start caring for and nourishing the land before expecting to obtain its fruits. When the land is happy it also gives beautiful fruits, and it stays healthy.

Out of the practice of mourning with and for trees, and of somatic gardening I have been developing the practice of “the gift”. This is another gateway practice of gathering and sharing eco-material objects with a group to connect with each other and with the land and to explore the possibility and the boundaries of reciprocity. Bringing the land into our ecosomatic conversation through the offering of a “gift”, be it through words or through dance, is at the same time an experience of ecosomatic connectedness and of cultural regeneration. This emerging trajectory in my ecosomatic work foregrounds the embodied responsive processes through which we can witness the emergence of choreographies of reciprocities with the nonhuman and matter. The very notion of choreography and of “chorus” (in the ancient Greek sense of κoreuein, to dance) is to be renewed so that we can discover new ways of responding together as a collective body to the great challenges of our time in alliance with plants and other forms of life.

For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2025, “Roots and Trajectories of my Ecosomatic Practice~Research’’, www.raffaelerufo.com/ecosomatics/roots-and-trajectories