Psychic Landscapes: Walking and Dreaming with the Land
 

Between Artist Residency, Pilgrimage and Retreat
 

Psychic Landscapes is a pilgrimage into the living intelligence of land, water, body and myth.

Situated between artist residency, retreat and pilgrimage, the format invites participants into the artistic research of Petja Ivanova through walking, dreaming, somatic practice, ritual design and encounters with sacred waters and charged landscapes.

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Artistic Research

The journey grows out of more than five years of Ivanova’s artistic research into **geo-somatics**: a practice-based inquiry into how imperial, capitalist and modern epistemologies have separated bodies from land, sensation, ritual and more-than-human relation.

Against this disembodied inheritance, Psychic Landscapes asks how we might re-learn relation and  where we start listening into our bodies so carefully that we can hear the living world speak (through us).

Through wisdom traditions, myth, embodied practice, walking, listening and dreaming with water, the pilgrimage opens a space in which knowledge is sensed and received, and affect becomes a planetary signal.

The wound of separation becomes an entrance: a threshold through which the body can begin to remember its continuity with the living world.

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The Practice

Participants are invited into a temporary community of attention.

Together, we walk, listen, rest, write, sense, dream and gather around places where land and water have long held ritual, healing and communal meaning.

Springs, rivers, caves, paths, plants and weather are not treated as scenery, but as participants and co-creators of the process.

In this journey we move beyond landscape as an outside environment to a shared body, a psychic and material field we belong to.

This journey proposes a shift in perspective: we do not stand outside the world observing it — we are part of its expression, as witnesses within it. The earth dreams us as we remember it.

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With Alexandra Gruebler

Artist and musician Alexandra Gruebler offers an entrance into landscape through grief and sounding.

Within the un-school, she will guide a gentle sounding process of integration and connection, weaving together life, death, deep time, mineral memory and collective presence.

Her session opens a space for conversation, calm exchange and somatic listening around the geopoetics of Deep Time, the mineral zircon and resilience.

Grief is approached here in a spectral sense: it may be personal and precise, but also ecological, ancestral, planetary or difficult to name.

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Format

As part residency and part retreat, the programme is an offering.

We meet in the mornings to land into the day together and share practices of geo-somatics, somatic attention and planetary belonging.

The afternoons are dedicated to walking in the land: being with springs, caves, monasteries and landscapes, and joining Alexandra in practices of singing and sounding with place.

The final days offers the possibility to camp at the Temple of Asclepius in Zlatna Panega, learn its myths and tune into water dreaming practices known from Bulgarian folklore. 

Tents would be provided. Local food will be catered.

 

Invitation

Psychic Landscapes is an invitation to practice ecology as relation.

To feel the body as part of the Earth’s larger nervous system.

To encounter our embodied knowledge of water.

To rediscover forms of belonging that exist outside extraction and separation.