Home/bodies: Exploring the affective experiences of people at home using scenographic practice and ecological thinking

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This practice-led research will draw on the tactics of scenography to explore and reimagine routes for ecological (co)existence, focusing on the affective experiences of individuals in their domestic home environments. Through a series of practical mediations, the project will invite a group of participants (with stakes in the research outcomes) to apply scenographic strategies, traditionally employed within live performance, to their habitual living spaces. The creation of these experiences, alongside a critical analysis of participant responses, will be iteratively informed by ecological thinking: in particular Tim Ingold's concept of 'correspondence', Donna Haraway's meditations on 'response-ability' and Timothy Morton's reckoning with 'dark ecology', that speak to the interconnectedness of people, places and things in the context of contemporary life and the climate crisis. Through this, the project aims to challenge the binaries of inside/outside and private/public that were exacerbated by the global pandemic; to highlight the most familiar of everyday habitats -the home - as a site as worthy for ecological consideration as natural landscapes; and to furtherpossibilities for embodied modes of sustainable co-existence and habitation. Scenography - a practice rooted in the relationality of bodies, objects and environments (McKinney and Palmer 2017), as well as a means for orienting and othering place (Hann 2019) - grounds this project's methodology in the affective qualities of experience, accounting for the sensory, the material and the spatial. This approach is contextualised by Kathleen Stewart's 'atmospheric attunements' and 'ordinary affects', stimulating an attentiveness towards the animate encounters of everyday life that, whilst fleeting and evasive, are nonetheless powerful. Though this ability 'to attend' is facilitated here through artistic practice, the project will offer insights into how people relate - or can relate -to their familiar environments in ways that resonate with aspects of sociology, geography, architectural studies and ecocriticism, as well as current discourse in anthropology and philosophy.