CONTAMINATIONS: RESTING AS MOVEMENT PRACTICE

Duration: 60 min.

 

Resting as a Movement Practice

a quiet, wild activity 

 

This practice sharing draws on Geology of Being (GOB), a long-term research and artistic framework exploring ways of inhabiting time, space, and matter in relation to the Earth. It is an inquiry into rest—not as withdrawal, but as a mode of presence and relation: a physical negotiation with gravity, structure, and endurance.

 

The practice takes its cue from rock bodies—poised, bearing their shape moment after moment, millennia after millennia. It is inspired by their compacted energy and the quiet, wild activity of maintaining stance in a world of constant movement. Resting, in this context, becomes a somatic state that actively listens, releases, renegotiates, redistributes, and sustains.

It invites to explore these dynamics through the body—yielding, depositing, sustaining presence, and subtly shifting mass in response to internal and external forces.

 

At its core, GOB explores “techniques of gaze,” and practices of reading, listening, writing and embodying knowledge and relationality. It investigates the visible and invisible traces etched into land, body, and memory—and proposes an embodied response to these inscriptions. The work draws from physical interactions with rocky bodies and landforms as “partnering movers” in their many states, textures, and structures. It connects somatic experience with geological processes through movement research, choreographic exploration, writing, site-specific action, and performance.

 

This evolving practice is grounded in field explorations across Iceland, Greenland, Finland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, shaped by close readings of geological processes and dialogue with geologists as well as fellow artists.

 

_______________________________

 

 

Poised—embodying a familiar shape.

Letting it settle moment after moment,

motion after motion, without flinching.

 

 

Maintaining the stance, 

bearing that very shape

again and again

minute 

after 

minute, 

day 

after 

day

as if to prevail 

year 

after 

year 

for millennia 

 

the compacted energy within

shifts slightly—with care—only to balance.

renegotiating the mass —slowly, listening

 

Resting as a movement practice will be a quiet, wild activity, 

a simple presence

a stable persistence 

a relation 

 

a physical inquiry into what we miss when we think of “being,” or bare existence, as a purely passive state.

 

 

Zdenka Brungot Sviteková 

Works as a dance artist, performer, creator, and collaborator, and is a co-founding member of Ostružina z.s. She earned her degree from the Faculty of Music and Dance at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and expanded her embodied education through further studies across Europe and the US. Extended stays in the Nordic countries have deeply shaped her practice, attuning it to the subtle exchanges between body and earth.

Her work unfolds through movement research embracing sensorial and (eco-)somatic awareness, with a focus on active spectatorship as a form of relational presence. Guided by curiosity and respect for diverse cultures and landshapes, she cultivates creative dialogues that weave together dance, performing arts, visual arts, music, and natural sciences, seeking connections beyond human-centered perspectives.

Her project, Geology Of Being (GOB), is a sustained inquiry into the entangled kinship of earth and body—a long-term research and artistic practice that listens to the landshapes and moves in dialogue with their geological records. It invites attention to embodied knowledge as a vital way of cultivating curiosity, responsibility, and accountable relationships with the environment.

She is also interested in ecology of language, processes of facilitation and learning and is a member of the upwording team. Additionally, she collaborates with the Centre for Choreographic Development SE.S.TA, leading projects within creative education and the artistic process of creation.