Practices of reciprocity and witnessing in more-than-human collectivities

Through a somatic approach to my ongoing encounter with the River Wyre, Lancashire, I consider land - its material presence and immaterial spirit/ancestral relations - as primary collaborator. I explore the capacity for land to witness and propel human ethics and expression through the porous and influx body. This opens a mode of witnessing which both bears witness to historic trauma (the less visible entanglements of ecocide, femicide and epistemicide), and to more-than-human manifestations (in this case river and stone) that guide an 'otherwise' possibility to this colonial violence. Vocal sounding with more-than-human collectivities opens the capacity for the body to be 'in two places at once' - one of Silvia Federici's articulations of witchcraft - and troubles colonial-capitalism's division of Life and Non-life. The practice expands Kelly Oliver's definition of witnessing as inter-human 'response-ability and address-ability', through addressing - and being addressed by - more-than-human existents.