Collapsing in the face of climate turmoil

1) Elmer stands rigid, his head falls towards the floor together with his gaze.

2) Elmer lifts his torso, closing one hand in a fist and bringing it in front of the torso while he sets the other hand to his hip. He smiles a little embarrassed.

We transitioned to the body-based task and made a small warm-up together shaking, rubbing the palms together and putting the warm palms in front of the eyes. I invited Elmer to enter the images of climate destruction and then his activist experience. With the first image his head and gaze sank to the floor. I noticed that he was not feeling quite at ease with the task. I sensed disquiet in the micro movements of his body. With the second image he lifted up his torso and stood somewhat nervously with the other arm on his hips and the other fist showing to the front. When reflecting on it afterwards, he said he felt pretty much blank. When I inquired more to what was going on in him, he replied “I am such a mental person; I think it is a lot easier for me to talk or draw about things than to perform something with my body. Especially when moving on emotional topics.”

I appreciated Elmer’s honesty and pondered whether the way I had facilitated the body-based task through inner images was the best possible way to access the experience of the research participants. “I mean, there were many different body postures running through my head, but they felt like clichés that I didn’t want to enact. I don’t know… like for instance a hand making a stop-gesture coming from the stop climate change!⁴⁴ And then the feelings. Like first, fear because of climate change and then [after the action] empowerment, blah,” Elmer exclaims in a frustrated way. “Then I thought this is too much simplified, too much of a cliché.

I mean, some things are so hard to perform with the body. An abstract feeling, no idea. How should one

44 Halt, stopp Klimawandel

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spontaneously express utopia or freedom that go against violence and destruction? How?” Elmer asks.

(Attachment 17. Body-based task: Elmer.)

There are two things I want to pay special attention in this portrait of Elmer. Firstly, what happened to his body posture and head with the imagination of climate turmoil, and how he responded to me in the reflection with outrage. In the beginning, when embodying the image of climate turmoil, Elmer dropped his gaze and his head. Similar kind of body posture was repeated also by Alex, Wusa, Robin and Emil. The falling of the head was often coupled with low body tonality, collapsing body parts or even curling down. During the first task Robin’s knees, hip and ankles crumbled and lost their stand. In the reflection, Robin said that she had embodied the river erosion she had witnessed in Bangladesh. In the case of Bo, she even fell to her knees and then to the floor, lying on her back. Although not everyone expressed it with their words, these corporeal postures and movements reflected the powerlessness the research participants felt when confronted with climate turmoil and parallel political inaction (cf. Dias-Garcia 2018). Robin and Emil explicitly said that climate change made them feel powerlessness, whereas Wusa articulated the following: “Climate change is so dispiriting, putting me down”

(Attachment 9.).

Interestingly enough, also Indira curled down, but not driven by powerlessness, but by the desire to protect her belly. She imagined the centre of her body being the earth that needed protection. On the other hand, Wilma expressed that at times she felt the need to protect herself from the awareness that she needs to take action, and from the repressive consequences of activism. Xavier, from his parts wanted to shield himself against the feeling of helplessness itself: “It… like this feeling of powerlessness from which I want to protect myself. I think climate change is like, crap, and then naturally I become defensive” (Attachment 12.).

Emil’s reaction in the reflection after the movement journey was similar to Elmer’s. For both of them the observation of bodily sensations in connection with climate change evoked emotions that they were not prepared to face in that moment. In their responses the ungrasping immensity of climate change became present. For instance, Emil questioned whether the body-based task was even the right method to approach the question: “I found it quite harsh in the beginning, because I wasn’t really prepared for what came. I guess we should have first explored the topic more lightly, to do something very easy. Just to say that I should suddenly imagine climate change, what is actually also really personal…!” (Attachment 16.). Bo’s response of sinking down to the floor, reflected this too. For her climate turmoil felt in the

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moment of the body-based task utterly overwhelming. She had difficulties to grasp climate change with words, connecting it with and experience of talking to a friend who had just lost a parent.

Elmer felt that speaking or drawing his associations related to climate change and activism would have been easier. Elmer’s frustration got expressed in his question: “How should one spontaneously express utopia or freedom that go against violence and destruction? How?” His confusion and immobility in front of the task underscored the interconnectedness of climate turmoil with our lives. Elmer did not feel comfortable with acting out the banal representations of bodily postures related to activism that went through his mind. He also refused to reproduce the widespread narrative of first being individually afraid of climate change and afterwards feeling empowered having taken action. Although in the interview before the body-based task Elmer had accounted having gone through fear to empowerment in the actions of Ende Gelände, his reaction showed me that there was much more behind this narrative. This resonated also with the thoughts of Emil:

For me it was a really emotional image that arose in me, and it wasn’t like easy to act it out in front of you. I can’t really explain…Somehow, I had the feeling, I cannot answer your question. You had asked me to imagine climate change, what I absolutely cannot do! And then came this image...

and I didn’t really know if I could… how could I react to that. (Attachment 16. Body-based task:

Emil).

The reactions of Emil and Elmer underscored for me how wide the relations of imagination and violence in the resisting choreography reach, and how complexly intertwined they are. Their responses also underscored the interconnectedness of the personal-existential, political and international. For Elmer and Emil, the political reality of climate urgency was connected not only with and inner urge to act, but with very intimate emotions.

The excerpts above illustrate the corporeal consequences of climate turmoil and political inaction on the micro layer of the resisting choreography. In other words, climate change does not only affect bodies and minds in moments of floods and heat waves i.e. when the changes in weather conditions impact human bodies and their livelihoods. Rather, also the political dimension, notably the inaction of the governments and the continued climate destruction, for instance in the form of lignite mining, affect the people corporeally in many layers. This became very apparent during the body-based tasks of the research interviews.

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In this section, I have brought attention to the corporeal responses of collapse, low body tonality, crumbling, confusion and disorientation. However, accessing the pain connected with climate turmoil caused also corporeal responses opposite of collapsing and low muscular tonality. This was present notably in the cases of Josefine, Xavier and Wilma: their first corporeal responses to climate turmoil were stiffening and tension.