Abstract
<jats:p>For That We Lie Down. A body-intelligent community investigates touch, lying, and collective presence as performative strategies for reimagining public space. The research is an attempt to create an experience of new encounters and deeper relationships between human bodies, nature and objects and especially experiencing a city as a subject. Developed through artistic research in Hamburg, Salzburg, Yokohama, and Wien since 2021, the project relocates the intimate practice of touch from protected interiors into urban environments marked by speed, surveillance, transit, and historical sedimentation. A precisely set performative touching sequence as a clear context and frame brings forth a heightened bodily perception. Within which a city emerges not as pure infrastructure, but as a living organism: vulnerable, historical, wounded, and responsive. Through tactile engagement, participants are invited to experience urban space beyond visual representation and functional use. Layers of memory, traces of past events, and subtle material transformations become perceptible through the body. Touch operates as a mode of inquiry, revealing hidden relations between human presence, architecture, and environment. In this way, the performative act reconfigures the city as a dynamic field of affective encounters, where personal sensations intersect with collective histories and spatial inscriptions.The research draws upon somatic practices, Japanese philosophy, eco-critical thought, and feminist relational theory. Nishida’s concept of “pure experience,” Isabel Fremeaux’s ecology of interdependence, and Donna Haraway’s notion of situated coexistence form the theoretical constellation of this work. The project asks whether communities can emerge not through ideology or identity, that are mainly rational, but through shared corporeal attention in presence. Lying down becomes both resistance and listening: a refusal of acceleration and a method for sensing entanglement.</jats:p> <jats:p>keywords:</jats:p>