Listening to The Land: Exploring Indigenous Place-Thought Through Ecosomatic Art

This paper introduces a twenty-minute-long audio artwork that invites you to listen whilst taking a walk in an outdoor green space. The artwork guides the listener through a series of exercises for expanding sensory awareness and increasing embodied and intuitive engagement with their surroundings. As background this paper briefly explores the concepts and methodological pointers offered by scholar of Indigenous Studies Watts’ description of Indigenous Place-Thought; the understanding that the earth is animate and that humans are an extension of the earth. The paper also draws on the emergent field of eco-somatic art which focuses on the body as a site of connection and knowing. Therefore the artwork is an invite into a different kind of relationship. Listening to it helps to explore what happens to the way we feel about, and behave towards, the land if we take Indigenous frameworks, and the shift in perspective they offer, seriously.