About

What is Radical Contact?

Radical Contact is the name of a series of gatherings that took place from 2012 to 2018, mostly in Sweden. At the moment no new gatherings are planned. The project and the community are in a phase of reorientation. Below is a provisional project description adopted in 2017.

Radical Contact material refers to a body of work, developed at these gatherings and elsewhere, that combines the study and practice of contact improvisation with embodied approaches to social and political questions.

Some examples of body political questions we have tried to address in the past are: cultural constructions of health; issues of disability, fat, body image, beauty, body norms in general; the objectification of bodies in art, advertising and daily life; sexualisation and desexualisation of bodies; more generally, how society ascribes meaning to different zones of the human body; how experiences of violence and oppression differentially tune people’s autonomic nervous systems; or more generally, how domination takes root in the body.

The Radical Contact project is committed to an intersectional, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, trans and queer liberationist politics that is radically critical of state and nation. A politics that takes the legacies of colonialism and slavery seriously, questions ties of blood, family, clan and caste, seeks alternatives to the domination of children by adults, as well as the contempt of the old, and rejects mainstream norms of beauty and ability. A politics that questions the rule of humans over other living beings and the world at large.