What is Radical Contact? - - -
Radical Contact is the name of a series of gatherings that took place from 2012 to 2018, mostly in Sweden. At the moment no new - - - gatherings are planned. The project and the community are in a phase of reorientation. Below is a provisional project description adopted in 2017.
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Radical Contact material refers to a body of work, developed at these gatherings and elsewhere, that combines the study and practice of contact improvisation with embodied approaches to social and political questions. - - -
Some examples of body political questions we have tried to address in the past are: cultural constructions of health; issues of disability, fat, body image, beauty, body norms in general; the objectification of bodies in art, advertising and daily life; sexualisation and desexualisation of bodies; more generally, how society ascribes meaning to different zones of the human body; how experiences of violence and oppression differentially tune people’s autonomic nervous systems; or more generally, how domination takes root in the body. - - -
The - Radical Contact - project - is committed to a - n - intersectional, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, - trans - and queer liberationist - politics that is - radically critical of state and nation. - A politics that takes the legacies of colonialism and slavery seriously, questions ties of blood, family, clan and caste, seeks alternatives to the domination of children by adults, - as well as the contempt of the old, and rejects mainstream norms of beauty and ability. A politics that - questions - the - rule - of humans over other living beings and the world - at large. - - - -