Research field 09 · Ritual Space
Political emotions and embodied reflection
Between knowledge and action lies the body. Anger, grief, hope and exhaustion are personal experiences and political forces at the same time.
Many people are aware of war, climate crisis, democratic exhaustion, social division and powerlessness — and yet only with difficulty move into action. Between insight and doing lie affects that can hardly be dissolved by argument: fear, shame, conflicts of responsibility, anger, grief, emptiness, hope, exhaustion.
To this is added a social observation: many experiences of political overwhelm are lived in isolation. Digital permanent attention, the logics of social media, the flood of information and public outrage often produce an absence of resonance. Bodies stay in contraction, feelings circle, aliveness finds no shared space.
Re_Connection emerges from this assessment: as an attempt to form collective spaces of resonance in which political emotions can be perceived bodily, shared and brought into relationship.
How can one work with strong affects without merely discharging them or displacing them into the private?
Re_Connection as a research laboratory
This field is tested above all in Re_Connection — a collective research and practice group. Re_Connection is developed together with Susanne Gärtner from political education and Carolina Márquez from dance therapy and psychology. Arystan Petzold's contribution lies in the thematic-philosophical co-structuring, the musical framing, the non-verbal interaction and in questions from the research on ritual space — supported by experience from ritual research, performance, theatre, concerts and workshops.
Re_Connection connects live music, body awareness, movement, circle, language, political themes, artistic framing, threshold and bringing back. The roles are deliberately distributed: sound and dramaturgy, body work and regulation, political framing and reflection lie with several people. This is part of the ethics of the format. Re_Connection is a field of application and reflection within a larger research context.
- Anger, fear, shame and conflicts of responsibility
- Grief, powerlessness and emptiness
- Hope, connectedness and exhaustion
- Dose and orient
- Enable witnessing
- Translate affects into movement
- Secure the bringing back
What Re_Connection works with
Re_Connection works with political emotions through body, group, language, stillness and sound: with conflict, grief, anger, fear, powerlessness, solidarity, hope, activation and integration. Individual affects are made perceivable and holdable within a shared course.
Anger is a demanding example of this: it can be a precise perception of injustice, but it can equally escalate, privatise or moralise. A widespread notion of catharsis falls short; merely acting out aggression often creates new arousal instead of clarification. More important is the form an affect is given: whether it is dosed, held in witnessing and translated into shared movement. Somatic working terms such as window of tolerance, titration or pendulation are used carefully here.
Reflection out of bodily experience
Embodied reflection stays close to experience. It asks: what did my body know? What did the group hold? Where did intensity become too much? Where did room for action arise? And how does an experience return into everyday life, relationship and political responsibility?
Emptiness, collapse, grief and exhaustion can themselves be threshold states. They often show that a body needs another form of action, rest or relationship. For this Re_Connection seeks a space of resonance in which contraction, movement, stillness and language come together.
Sources
- Own research: working and research material Reconnection 2024–2026; artistic practice with live music, body work, circle and reflection.
- Political emotions: Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown: Coming Back to Life, 1998; Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone: Active Hope, 2012; Martha C. Nussbaum: Political Emotions, 2013; Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider, 1984; Myisha Cherry: The Case for Rage, 2021.
- Body, exhaustion and affect regulation: Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), 2010; Hartmut Rosa: Resonance, 2016; Daniel J. Siegel on the window of tolerance; Peter A. Levine on titration and pendulation; Brad J. Bushman and others on the critique of the catharsis model of aggressive discharge.
Open research status
What remains open is the honest question of effect: how can one describe and document what such spaces bring about, without tipping into claims of efficacy? Practice protocols, longer feedback and a clear separation between educational work, artistic research and therapy are the next steps here.