Between Artist Residency, Pilgrimage and Retreat 

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Psychic Landscapes is a wanderlust pilgrimage into the living intelligence of land, water, body and myth. Situated between artist residency, retreat and pilgrimage, the format invites participants to enter the artistic research of Petja Ivanova through walking, dreaming, somatic practice, ritual designs and encounters with sacred waters and charged landscapes.

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This 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. Through walking, somatic practice, sacred waters, myth and collective attention, the project asks how the body can become a site of re-sensitization: not by escaping into spirituality, but by reactivating forms of embodied, affective and ecological knowledge that have been rendered illegible by dominant systems of knowing.

Her work begins from the wound of separation — the historical, ecological and psychic rupture through which Western knowledge systems have learned to divide body from mind, nature from culture, human from more-than-human, and knowing from feeling.

Against this disembodied inheritance, Psychic Landscapes asks how we might re-learn relation. 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 is a planetary signal. The wound is not treated as failure, but as an entrance: a threshold through which the body can begin to remember its continuity with the living world.

​The artist and musician Alexandra Gruebler offers an entrance into landscape through grief and sounding.
Within the un-school, she will guide a gentle integration and connection that weaves together life, death, deep time, mineral memory and collective presence.Her session will open 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.
 

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 participants and co-creators of  this process.

The journey asks what becomes possible when landscape is no longer an outside environment, but a psychic and material field we belong to. As it is part residency and part retreat, the prgram is an offering. We will meet in the mornings to land into the day together and share practices or geo-somatics and other approaches to planetary belonging. The afternoons are for walking in the lands and being with springs, caves, monasteries and joining Alexandra to sing with them. The last day offers the possibility to camp at the temple of Asclepius in Zlatna Panega, learn its myths and tune in to water dreaming practices known from Bulgarian folk lore. Local food will be catered and 

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 water as memory and teacher, and to rediscover forms of belonging that exist beneath extraction and separation.