At the edge of connection / Clarinde Wesselink

at the edge of connection is a publication bringing together essays, observations, drawings, photographs, a month-long weather diary, a lexicon of touch, and 112 movement prompts. It follows a period of research into the many ways a body senses, moves through and is changed by the places it inhabits.

The book moves between encounters with lichens, frogs, insects, weather and different surfaces, and close observations of bodily sensation and movement. Writing becomes a way of registering these encounters: the tremor travelling from the ground through the legs, a change in the skin as the weather shifts or the unfamiliar rhythm of following a fly.

Running through the publication is a collection of prompts that can be practised in everyday life. They ask the reader to listen to falling leaves as a musical score, walk across different surfaces and describe what the feet feel, follow the movement of an insect, recall a journey through its sensory traces, or make a dance in which standing still is the most important movement. Rather than prescribing a particular way of moving, the prompts offer small departures from habitual ways of sensing a place. An observation becomes language; language becomes an instruction; and the instruction can return to the body as another movement.

The publication forms one part of at the edge of connection, alongside a performance-installation of the same name.