other others 〰 a place for skin thinking is a distributed, hybrid symposium that explores touch across disciplines and practices.



These free events are held mostly on Sundays this Fall, some in-person and some online. Contributors include: Amon Elise, Kyooeun Jang, Molly Frizzell, Petra Kuppers, Carolina Mendonça, Teddy Pozo, Hannah Rubin, Kim Upstill, Joshua Wicke, Tyra Wigg, Ryat Yezbick, and Mlondi Zondi, bringing together artists, performers, scholars and activists to share research, scores, and somatic workshops.


Events 




Event Information


Sunday, September 28th 


VIRTUAL SESSION: 
Mlondi Zondi + Petra Kuppers
@ 10am - 12pm PDT (ZOOM)

Register here



Mlondi Zondi, “The Hand that Touches De Kock”
Mlondi Zondi (they/them) is a scholar and interdisciplinary artist whose research focuses on contemporary Black performance and art history. They are Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at USC. Their talk interweaves touch, reconciliation, apartheid, and psychoanalysis.

Petra Kuppers, “Planting Disabled Futures: Touching Plant Elders in Virtual Reality” 
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a Disability culture activist, writer, community performance artist and author of Eco Soma. Her talk + somatic session engages crip intimacies, and invites the audience into an immersive world of healing plants cultivated by Disabled peoples’ embodied ways of knowing.




Thursday, October 2nd 


IN PERSON SESSION:
Touch Club with hannah rubin + Kim Upstill
@ 7:00 - 9:00 pm PDT, in person at METABOLIC STUDIO

RSVP


  • Access Notes: 
Accessible bathrooms are available on site. Low light/darkness/mood lighting will be used during the session. We will choose the location (indoors or outdoors) based on the weather and access needs of the group, so please let us know in your RSVP!


hannah will guide a grief choreography composed of embodied reading, writing, raw clay, water, and walking. This slow unfolding invites participants to move with loss, while being with its texture, weight, and presence in the body.

Kim will provide an invitation into partnered movement through the form of a slow dance. Taught outside of footwork and inside of embrace, this workshop is interested in mutual listening, lead and follow dynamics, slow movement and partnered, slow, dance.




hannah rubin is an LA-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and somatic practitioner whose work explores the queerly ecological relationships between body, language, and environment. Drawing on practices of experimental poetry, performance, and visual art, their work investigates how structures—both physical and social—shape collective and intimate experiences of grief and desire.

Kim Upstill is an artist, poet, performer and researcher who moves between the worlds of food/feeding, partner dance, writing and seeing. They find these areas to be interconnected spaces of language where language expands from the verbal or written into the somatic and sensitive. Languaging-with in this understanding becomes an act of touching-with, be that with a plant, a person, a feeling or a fiction. Upstill makes work motivated by love for the aliveness of being with others- in complication, in miscommunication, under capitalism, in pleasure.


Sunday, October 12th


VIRTUAL SESSION with:
Jacey Eve + Molly Frizzell + Kyooeun Jang
@ 10:00 am  - 12:00 pm PDT (ZOOM)

REGISTER HERE



Jacey Eve (they/them) is an ICF Professional Certified Coach, Aston Patterning® Bodywork Practitioner, and somatic educator offering individual and group coaching programs. Their specialty is helping individuals move through complexity with ease—in body, psyche, and environment—so they can bring their brilliance to the world and enjoy themselves along the way. Jacey will lead an embodied practice exploring self-touch as a portal to self-awareness, noticing how you meet your body, and what this reveals about your paradigms of self.

Molly Frizzell (she/her) is a PhD candidate at USC Annenberg whose dissertation considers how the ultrasound constructs the body as a site of affective power. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), affect theory, and feminist media studies, her research is methodologically grounded in multimodal critical discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches. This talk will discuss heartbeats, feeling, sound, touch, and antenatal entities.

Kyooeun Jang (she/her) is a 5th year PhD Candidate in Communication. Her research focuses on platform governance, online child safety, and XR technologies. This talk will discuss XR technologies, haptic wearables, consent, privacy and mediated social touch.



Carousel image descriptions: Reference image from Kyooeun Jang's research of four touch-screen watches display affective symbols over a violet background; and ultrasound image of a grainy black and white ultrasound image with a conical shape; Drawing by Julie Murphy showing two human figures drawn in purple. One lying down stretching with arm overhead. The other with hands-on contact supporting the movement. Within the figures are lines representing the energy flowing within, between, and around them and the significance of their relational dynamic. Inside the body are small scenes representing the figure's lived experiences, stored cellular memories, visions, aspirations, and journey of empowerment.


Sunday, October 19th


IN PERSON SESSION:
Touch Club with Ryat Yezbick
@ 4:00  - 6:00 pm PDT, in person at Santa Monica Beach:
South of the pier at the Ocean Park Beachwalk

RSVP HERE



  • Carpools:  If you would like a ride or can offer a ride, please add it here! 
  • Public transit: The meeting place is 20 min walk from the Downtown Santa Monica Metro Station (E Line). Get in touch if you’d like to take the metro and coordinate a ride from the station
  • PARKING: Cheapest parking: Free first 90 min, after that $2 for 2 hrs Santa Monica City Parking Structures 1-8 (about 5-6 city blocks away) Locations: Parking Structure 2 map link / Parking Structure 6 map link / Parking Structure 7 map link / Parking Structure 8 map link
  • PARKING: Closest parking (with no-step access to beach): Beach Parking Lot 3 @1750 Appian Way, Santa Monica 90401 map link Please see posted parking fees.
  • Access Notes: A wood boardwalk provides wheelchair access to the site. Public bathrooms are available here.


Ryat will offer their Collision Practice, a live performance score that explores impact, falling and holding as collective processes for politically tumultuous times.

This session will happen on a public beach near the Santa Monica Pier, offering something between an open rehearsal and a performative intervention.

This session will be video recorded. All bodies and levels of engagement are welcome: we need colliders, holders, witnesses, interpreters. 



Ryat Yezbick is a visual artist who explores the body, memory, and the politics of witnessing in the era of digital surveillance and decentralized global conflict. Figuring their lived experience centrally in their work, Yezbick addresses a complex set of questions around security, gender, home, family, love, violence, power, and responsibility within the context of the crumbling U.S. empire. They work in a variety of mediums – notably live performance, experimental documentary, installation, new media, and drawing – that have garnered support from audiences and curators internationally. They are a published author, multi-time grant recipient, and faculty member in the Narrative and Emerging Media Program at Arizona State University. They are currently a MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow and ONX Studio Fellow. Their work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Glasgow, and Athens.


Sunday, October 26th


VIRTUAL SESSION with:
Amon Elise + Teddy Max Pozo + Tyra Wigg
@ 10:00 am - 12:30 pm PDT (ZOOM)

REGISTER HERE



Amon Elise is a community organizer, cuddle facilitator, consent guardian, and erotic communicator. They are reshaping Black queer spaces in Los Angeles through the revival of Decadence, a Black and queer-only play party, and LA Cuddle Club, a space for platonic intimacy. With an intentional approach, Amon Elise fosters environments where Black queer people can exist without compromise; reconnecting with each other through community, consent, and care. In this session, Amon will discuss cuddling as a revolutionary practice and share the structures they’ve developed for their gatherings.

Teddy Max Pozo is an artist, writer, and scholar exploring the sense of touch in aesthetics and technologies of video game design. A former curator of the Queerness and Games Conference and current member of the Trans Games Zine collective, Pozo focuses on collaboration and connection between queer and trans game makers and trans-capacious  video game audiences. Their writing and art has appeared in Game Studies Journal, TSQ, and is forthcoming in Feminist Media Histories. They teach at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. In this session, Teddy will present their research “touchy-feely games: the haptics of trans game design.”

Tyra Wigg  (Sweden/Switzerland) works with choreography, dance, and performance art. Tyra’s background in massage therapy and care work has stimulated a curiosity in how artistic and physiotherapeutic practices can intersect and expand subjective corporealities. They embrace choreography and performance art as strategies to connect with the desires and conflicts of the sensing body in its cultural, political, and material environment. Tyra’s session “phone massage” invites receivers to construct a sensory anatomy based on the information that they choose to share. This information is used to generate a collective body which Tyra massages at a distance. Relaxation and exploration come hand in hand. Inspired by the body/fantasy stimulating practice of phone sex, “phone massage” is an interactive performance that offers treatment remotely through prosthetic touch and audio transmission.



Sunday, November 2nd


VIRTUAL SESSION with:
Carolina Mendonça + Joshua Wicke
@ 10:00 am  - 11:00 am PDT (ZOOM)

REGISTER HERE



PEDAGOGIES OF UNWANTED TOUCH
In an open conversation format, Carolina and Joshua will turn their gaze towards the (un)makings of a self through the intrusive touch of childhood sexual abuse, attending to the pedagogies that unfold within such violence. 

This is a new project emerging from their shared perspective as survivors. It follows a recent collaboration at Tanzhaus Zürich featuring Avgi Saketopoulou called Risking Repetition. Aesthetics of «Survival», which explored performative modes of survival in which artists are “risking repetition” (Ann Cvetokovic) rather than avoiding the revision of trauma. Previously, they have also collaborated on Carolina Mendonças Piece “Zones of Resplendance” and were both contributors to Haptic Affinities:  a research group on touch, haptics, and intimacy in the arts, alongside Isabel Lewis, Anna Zett, Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, and many others.

This session will be followed by an optional decompression room for anyone who wants to linger in virtual togetherness.


Images from Carolina Mendonça‘s “Zone of Resplendence” and “Risking Repetition. The Aesthetics of “Survival”” co-curated by Joshua Wicke in the framework of “structures of unfeeling” by SOHERE.


Carolina Mendonça  is a choreographer and a dramaturg that has been dealing with the relation between choreography and violence for years. Her most recent projects are Something is Approaching (2025), a rumination on how our muscles might be silently preparing for self defense and Zones of Resplendence (2023), which speculates around feminist perspectives on violence. She is the dramaturg and research partner of the Cadela Força Trilogy by Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo.

Joshua Wicke is a curator and dramaturg working in performance, dance and theatre. Recently Joshua has been pursuing the question of how residues of infrastructural and interpersonal violence work within and against aesthetics. Joshua worked in Berlin, Zürich, Brussels collaborating with artists such as Moved by the Motion, caner teker, Carolina Mendonça and others and curated the series “Poetics of Refusal” and Co-Curated “Risking Repetition. Aesthetics of “Survival”.”




  



About other others 〰


Organized by Touch Praxis (Nina Sarnelle + Selwa Sweidan), other others is a series that brings together artists, facilitators, and scholars to explore embodied connection, anti-colonial touch, and collective care through interactive installations, performances, workshops, conversations, a zine publication, and screenings. The series began in May at Human Resources Los Angeles.

Borrowing terminology from Sara Ahmed's intersectional feminism, "other others" considers the proximity and distance between "others"—rather than emerging from the identities we possess—to be generated through relation and even physical encounter. What does it mean to be in ethical contact with one another? How do we move through physical intimacies while navigating the systemic power structures that shape every encounter?




Supporters


These sessions have been generously supported by:


  



Questions?


Reach out to: touchpraxis [at] gmail [dot] com