How do we relate to spaces where Water and Earth meet? Can their particular transitional and interstitial qualities help re-orient human ways of moving-sensing together? These questions form part of my larger research and works around Walking-Dancing with the Elements, and guided the walkshop titled Lama–Mud: Coming home to where we came from. The walkshop was part of WAC 25, the International Prespa Walking Arts Encounter 2025 in Greece.

Lama (maybe let the word roll on your tongue for a moment) means mud in Portuguese. Lama-Mud, weaving together Portuguese and English, is one way of referring to the special textures of the space where Water and Earth meet, and how they tickle our feet.

[Foto: Sensing Flow + Resonance in Chapada Diamantina, Bahia, North-Eastern Brazil. December 2024. © Doerte Weig]

On July 2, 2025, on the banks of the stunning Lake Prespa in Northern Greece, walkshop participants are invited to squelch with sand, lama-mud, and other forms of wet earth beneath their feet (With the focus on walking, it’s called a walkshop, not a workshop). The idea is to sense the ecosomatic, interstitial, more-than-human qualities of water and earth with your toes and soles of your feet. And – through your feet as sensors – to try and listen to the stories land and lake want to share with us, on that day.

We first gather as a group on the hill path leading down to the lake, to ask for participants’ associations around Water and Earth. Here are some of the voices we hear:

Earth is home; Water is necessary. When they’re together it’s natural. They are meant to be together; they are meant to connect.

Where water and land meet … that is where I’m most at home; right on that edge.

Earth is like the body that holds. Water brings everything together; it connects everything to the Earth.

We move down to the lake, to a space where sand is visible and foot-sense-able. Because of continuously lowering water levels, the shores of Lake Prespa are now composed of algae-covered stones which used to be submerged. (The day before I had journeyed around the lake to find juicy, squelchy lama-mud for the walkshop. In the end, I was glad to discover the site with interstitial water-sand where we then did our explorations).

The afternoon sun accompanies our two-hour exploration, during which I offer the participants three prompts. The first invitation, Proposition One, is to walk along the water’s edge, to engage with that space where water, sand, small pebbles and other organic materials meet. What is it that feet feel and sense walking in this interstitial space? How do we as humans experience this connection of Water Earth, (our) bodying-ecology relations, through our feet?

The second inquiry, Proposition Two, is based on the Aquatic Ape Theory on human origins. Contrary to common understandings around homo sapiens originating on the dry savannah, the Aquatic Ape Theory considers that our ancestors lived in coastal or riverine environments, and that this is where we lost our body hair and developed bipedalism (walking on two legs).
Nowadays, shoreline erosion is known to disrupt this kind of sense of place and belonging.

[Foto: Participants exploring interstitial spaces along shoreline of Lake Prespa, July 2025. Greece.]

Participants are asked to explore laterally into the lake, actively connecting the hill, shoreline and the deepening water; whilst imagining this space as their home. What does it feel like if this space is where you find your daily food, community, and safety? The heat of the sun heightens feeling the temperature changes of the water, as people move from the shore into the lake and back, sensing-listening with their feet, playing with the floating qualities of the lakeside algae.

Proposition Three considers the geography and history of Lake Prespa, which forms part of one of the oldest river and lake systems on the European continent, and of modern geopolitical claims; the border point between three European countries, namely Greece, Albania and Macedonia, is literally in the middle of the lake. What does it do to sense into this transitional quality, where the official political frontier between three countries is a continuously shifting-moving point in water? Proposition Three takes this challenge one step further, to inquire about Water as more than passive, and instead as an active entity, which can carry a sense of peace.

This is the moment where I offer the learning from my previous explorations to the group: Water as a being, carrying a quality of peace. What happens to our feet and bodying, if we allow them to become locations for a decolonial reflection around borders, conflict, and peace? Can Water help to bring humour, humility, and creative energy to questions around power; moving away from power-over and towards power-with? What then happens in the walkshop is deeply moving, as the group forms two responses to these questions; one a shared practice, one an artistic response.

[Foto: Co-creating a joint practice: Water, Hands and a Line of Peace]
[Foto: Preparing the artful nest to meet the water]

We close the walkshop together, and I am left to marvel at how Water& Earth have taken us on a deep journey, even sharing elemental qualities of peace in such beautiful, moving and creative ways.

Later on, in August 2025, I spend one week walking with the River Maas on the border of Holland and Belgium, as part of the project Maaswacht (https://taat.live/projects/maas-lab/)
Towards the end of this week, my feet are drawn to rest at the lowest point of the now dry and visible river bed. The stones are pressing against the souls of my feet, then my legs and upper body as I lie down, and, breath by breath, drawing me in, to this dry interstitial space of stone and water. Getting comfortable and letting my muscles relax against the pressure of the stones, images and sensations from my different explorations of Walking-Dancing with the Elements in Brazil, Mexico, Germany and Greece during 2025 pass through my bodying.

[Foto: Walking-with the River Maas, Holland, August 2025]

This moment allows me to experience the obvious visual and physical absence of Water as the opposite. I am able to sense the seeming absence as a continuing presence, a felt plenitude. It’s one of these moments of walking-dancing with Water, where my bodily experience and cognitive perception defy what “should” be happening, and I am called to trust the holistic, felt ecosomatic way of knowing. I later write a poem to try and find human words for Absence as Presence of Water, which also takes me further into questions around walking, shorelines, and climate change.

[Foto: Embedded in and listening to the dry river bed of the Maas. August 2025. © Doerte Weig

From the breathing-with-stones on the riverbed of the Maas also emerges an ecosomatic practice with the name Conflict as Flow and Echo (https://movementresearch.net/ecosomatics/conflict-as-flow-and-echo/). This practice challenges us to experience conflict not as an antagonistic, aggressive process of fighting. Instead, the invitation is to experience conflict as resonant flow, as relation, ongoingness, and echo. Conflict as flow and echo – maybe this could become our usual human thing to do?

The last footfall is then to weave together the ecosomatic invitation on Conflict as flow with the idea of the Aquatic Ape Theory that humans, as we know ourselves, emerged from interstitial Water-Earth spaces. Walking-with-Water can help us shift our human understanding of peace, and consider peace as more than a legal or political construct. Rivers and other bodies of Water teach us principles of being in relation, of relationality. ‘Coming home to where we came from’ in Water, then also means coming home to our watery origins as carrying relational qualities of peace.

If we are able to and allow ourselves to feel Water as relational peace quality, it inspires humans to find forms for joint walking practice and create artworks. Water as a being of peace traverses national frontiers with ease, be it in the middle of Lake Prespa, or as the River Maas shifting its flow along the official boundary between Holland and Belgium. The word peace could come to mean an internal disposition and commitment to listening to Water & Earth, to their both ancient and contemporary whispering and storytelling. Through our feet, and if we are prepared to listen as we move, we can sense what they are sharing with us in that moment, as their elemental movement qualities inspire healing and transformation.