Eco Soma

More about the book

In Eco Soma, Petra Kuppers encourages readers to engage with their embodied responses to art and recognize their roles as active participants in a shared sociocultural landscape. The book explores contemporary performance and artful interactions, emphasizing a disability culture sensitivity aimed at fostering socially just futures. Kuppers introduces eco soma methods that blend realities at the intersection of lived experience and site-specific performance, inviting readers to embrace imaginative transformations—becoming moths, sprouting gills, or embarking on starships into crip time. Fantasy plays a crucial role in these explorations, as Kuppers evokes sensations of monsters, catastrophes, and other vivid imagery. The text highlights ecopoetic disability culture perspectives, asserting that disabled individuals and their allies create art to navigate a changing world, engaging with feminist, queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous art movements. By proposing innovative ways to conceptualize "environments," Kuppers emphasizes art-based methods for envisioning change, suggesting that disability can inspire creative approaches to living with agency amid unrest and challenges. Traditional somatics refine our introspective senses, while eco soma methods expand this focus to the creative potential in the connections between self, others, and the land, advocating for a method of sensory tuning that promotes ethical cohabitation