Biography: jiara’s current practice wanders-wonders at the intersection of dance, ecology, and technology. via sensing, relating, and tuning, she sees dance as a relational practice of moving with and attuning to feral fringes, plant pace, and odd kinships. most recently, she is exploring the somatics of moving at the paces and as the textures of snail, stomata, lichen, and various sea creatures…she is curious about how embodied and sensorial somatics may invite pores, pauses, porosity and permeability in human actions, and continues to be moving-moved, touching-touched, and sensing-sensed with and by the more-than-human world ~
Website: wanderinprocess.wordpress.com
Lichen Learning
“quite, tiny, serene, subtle, minimal, fragile, whimsical, fantasy, poetic…and symbiosis!” are a couple of words that begin to sparkle in my mind when i think of lichen. lichen is(are) always more than one, and its/their very way of being is always practicing co-creative practices. lichen seems to embody a vibe of mystery, softly refusing to be known or grasped, by any human-centered manipulative mind. it would not fit neatly into a category. it invites us to stay with the unknown more-than-human forces that is wiggling at the fringe of our normative perception. it almost feels like i can not just learn “about” lichen, but have to learn “with” it and “as” it; lichen throws me into the inquiry of: how can I engage in an art-making process that likens to the lichen-being, not just making art about lichen? and even learning “about” lichen is already calling for a kind of somatic efforts, entering an alternative pace and perception — to pause, to lean in, bend down, to notice closely and subtly, and attune attention to something that is tiny, little, negligible, and seems “useless”; and to imagine, what does it feel like to live a lichen-time, lichen-texture, lichen relations? i’m also fascinated with its minimal resistance and resiliency in its lovely way of finding grounding surface – it never inhabits a designated “shelter”, it overflows, leaks into, and attaches lightly onto a temporal surface, oftentimes for a durational time, and it doesn’t ask for permission. lichen reminds me to practice being available and responsive to constantly changing conditions. (and i’m curious: how does lichen feel about being described by words?)