Following the previous blog…
Another contradiction I found is that grounding techniques often suggest returning to the senses as a way out of dissociation — touching something cold, noticing colours, listening to ambient sound. But in reality, sensory environments themselves can also trigger dissociation.
For me, sitting with my entire family in one particular dining room makes me physically ill. The lighting, the overlapping voices, the enclosed space and the social performance required make me dizzy and nauseous. Nothing extreme is happening. No one is shouting. No argument is taking place. And yet my nervous system responds as if it is under threat.
This experience made me realise that dissociation is not always tied to obvious danger. Sometimes it is caused by atmosphere. In this context, “body-mind listening” becomes less about hearing sound and more about sensing environments. If dissociation can be produced by ordinary environments, then grounding may not come from “neutral” sensory input, but from carefully constructed sonic and spacial conditions that allow the body to feel safe again.
When I shared the prototype of my current project with Ingrid, she described the experience as both dissociative and hypnotic. She introduced me to the term body-mind listening and asked a question that stayed with me: What does it look like if the listening space reflects the genre?
We discussed DJ Gurl, and I immediately imagined a hyper-specific scene of the driver’s seat of a truck, where outside the window is a flickering dark club – people dressed in early-2000s aesthetics, dancing in strobe light.
For my own work, however, the imagined space is much quieter. I think of the rooms where I used to do homework with closed doors and controlled silence. In my work, I try to recreate such rooms. I would like to install speakers in distance for playing subtle certain door sound and footsteps sound.