In my keynote Material Listenings – Traveling in the Borderlands of Costume, Exploring Collective Bodies at the Riga Performance Festival Starptelpa conference Embodied Visions: Performativity, Visuality, Materiality (1960s–1980s), I unfolded aspects of the artistic practices of Lygia Clark, Maria Blaisse, and Pauline Oliveros, and shared insights from my ongoing artistic research project Community Walk—a participatory, textile-relational practice that explores how human and nonhuman bodies co-compose fragile, collective constellations. Each iteration of Community Walk invites participants to co-wear a costume and walk together, attuning to one another with a heightened sense of with-ness. Through these shared movements, the work cultivates a polyphonic kind of listening—attentive to difference, risk, tenderness, and transformation. The walks are not choreographed in advance but emerge through soft hosting, relational responsiveness, and a willingness to dwell in the unpredictable.

As part of the keynote, I invited the audience into an artistic intermezzo: a moment of embodied participation in which we co-wore a hand-crocheted textile network. In this shared gesture, we temporarily enacted the fragile and interdependent nature of collective becoming—dwelling together in the porous space between independence and mutual care.

I am grateful to Laine Kristberga for the kind invitation to share my research in this context.

I like to acknowledge Metropolis that hosted the first version of Community Walk (2020) and have invited the participatory version of Community Walk to be part the Performing Landscapes (2025) program.