The mentoring program in ecosomatic art and education is tailored for strengthening the mission of every artist and/or educator to be an active generator in creating and waking up awareness in the community about ecological and sustainability issues. How art and education can create and hold spaces to embody reflections about this issues. How the artists and teachers can come out of the artist bubble and obsolete structures of education and serve to the community as a catalyzer for change.

“We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature’s ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life.”

– Fritjof Capra

This mentoring program is for artist and educators that are concerned about the environment. As such, they want to create art that improves an area environmentally and/or that highlights a specific environmental issue addressing also aesthetics, ethics, politics, culture, and economics, and the impact these have on the world’s ecosystems.

The program propose that the basics of settling and rooting an ecological and sustainable way of living in the community starts from getting back to the body and understanding/experience it as nature and how, in the very cellular memory of the body, we find guidelines, ideas and ways for re-discover and creating new experiences that will allow a repatterining in our body. All of that will influence on the relationship ourselves, among us and with nature. The training gives you the possibility to make a deep diving into your own field of work: dance, music, visual art…, from an ecosomatic experience and the studies of ancestral practices that have carried the bases of an ecological knowledge for thousands of years.

In this training we want to invite you to get the answers -and new questions- from your body experience about how to create art and/or hold an educational space using natural materials in awareness of nature, how through a somatic approach in arts and education you can inform the community about environmental issues. That includes also cultural and political and everything that continuously create the environment where we live. How art and education can help to remediate and reclaim damaged environments or even restore ecosystems in artistic ways, how to open possibilities of creatively propose new ways for sustainability, recovering and coexistence.

Mentoring program in ecosomatic art and education module 1 

Themes per week:

First week:       Reflections from the body

Second week: Human specie relating with nature

Third week:     Nature as the platform for creation and learning

Forth week:     Methods for practicing art in/with nature

The 85% of the training will happen in outside spaces in nature and will include discussions, guided investigation, personal laboratory work, writing of papers (1-2 per week), instant composition sharing. The training will offer the possibility to experience the large impact of nature in the body going through works of demanding physicality to a deep contemplative experience.

This training has being running for 3 years and it has have the participations of artist and teachers from countries as: Finland, Chile, Portugal, Holland and Japan.

The program is dictated in Finland.

The mentoring program in ecosomatic art and education it has being created and is dictated by the dance/environmental artist and shamanic tradition holder and teacher Gabriela Aldana.