Emotional geography, 2024

photo Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Azores, Atlantic Ocean 2024

The water that surrounds me stimulates that familiar feeling of purification, relaxation and freedom that I feel when my head and body are immersed in water. In what way does a material connection with a particular aquatic environment have somatic effects on the body, and what emotions are mobilized in that connection?

photo Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Azores, Atlantic Ocean 2023-24

Explore all your experience with just a touch. (Embodied practices)

The embodiment has become an important facet of thinking through emotional geographies. We should think about how we feel and we should also think through and through the bodies. The material of water experienced at the level of the body can open up an awareness of our social and spatial situation. This relational dynamics of emotions, where sensory engagement can mobilize a certain kind of emotional response as an ongoing process of experiencing and remembering places, spaces, people and landscapes. Immersion is formed by the continuous layering or addition of “to” the embodied experience, which in turn mobilizes a certain complexity of emotions.