Archive of Gestures

Archive of Gestures, By Amanda Camenisch

I’m walking.

I walk across dry, hardened earth. The ground beneath my feet is compacted, compressed by the weight and repetition of many footsteps before mine. It does not yield; it remembers. This is not the soft, forgiving soil of untouched terrain, but land that has been walked over, traversed, and perhaps forgotten. Its surface flattened by routine, by passage, by habit. As I walk, I can feel the cadence of my steps reverberate through the bones of my body, echoing into the ground like a quiet drumbeat. I imagine the subtle tremor of my presence moving ahead of me, carried along the subterranean weave of soil and root, alerting small creatures to my approach.

This is Hyde Park. A place once imagined for leisure, now more often a corridor. A space between origins and destinations. I cross it not as its steward but as its stranger. This land does not belong to me, nor I to it. It is managed by the City of London, maintained as civic terrain. Yet some part of me longs for a different relationship, one of intimacy, responsibility, and kinship.

My ancestors were farmers. I was taught early on that no soil is neutral. Land is not inert; it is alive. It requires care, attention, reciprocity. They saw themselves not as owners, but as caretakers. Participants in a sacred contract between heaven and earth, humans and the more-than-human world. Boundaries, in their cosmology, were not assertions of possession but markers of responsibility. To tend the land meant to listen, to observe, to prune what is sick, to harvest only what has ripened, to sow seeds with care and to wait patiently, prayerfully, for the earth to respond. When the spirits of the land were willing, there would be yield. In this practice, the sacred and the practical were not separate but inseparable. Spirituality was not an abstraction; it was a rhythm, a cycle, a task. It made sense because it had purpose and in that purpose, there was meaning.

But a question persists within me: as we walk the earth, tracing the outlines of a landscape shaped by memory and time, what are we tracing in the sky? We are not the only ones in motion. The planets spin, the stars revolve, the galaxy itself spirals. We are part of this vast choreography. In ancient traditions, maps were not simply tools for navigation; they were sacred diagrams, cosmograms, incantations. They encoded not just geography, but metaphysics. They marked the paths not only of humans, but of spirits. It is unclear whether humans follow the tracks of spirits or spirits trace the paths of humans, but their movements most likely intersect. Crossroads, wells, cairns, these were always more than landmarks. They were thresholds, energetic nodes, places where the veil thinned.

What, then, are the equivalents of these sacred nodes within the body? What rivers of energy, what meridians or ley lines, run through us? Where do the footpaths of our ancestors continue within the corridors of our muscles, our instincts, our longings? To what extent are our choices, the paths we take or avoid, shaped by inherited rhythms, ancestral memories, or the silent inscriptions of history moving through our blood?

Rhythm, then, is more than sound. It is inscription. It writes itself across the body. It stores memory in muscle. It reveals the hidden geometries that bind us to the land, to time, to one another.

A map opens up which knows no boundaries.

Tim Ingold distinguishes between mapmaking, a god’s-eye abstraction used to assert ownership, and mapping, which emerges from within a world already alive, entangled, and responsive. Mapping is embodied. It is the act of moving with awareness through space, allowing the rhythms of our bodies and the memory of landscape to merge. Mapping is a form of home-making, not in the architectural sense, but in the sacred sense of locating oneself within a cosmology.

In this view, land is not a resource, but a relationship. Myths and stories that arise from certain rivers, forests, or stones are ontological coordinates. They tell us who we are, where we come from, and how we are to move. Our ancestors understood this land to be sacred not as metaphor, but as truth. They personalised the land out of reverence. Mountains were not inert formations but elders. Lakes were not water bodies but portals. Stones carried stories, and trees bore witness. Every movement one made had to be in alignment with the spirits of nature and the universe. Nothing simply existed outside this sacred order. Every gesture was part of a larger cycle, a cosmological choreography in which human action was participatory. It is within this circling stream that we move, as extensions of ancestral pathways, divine rhythms, and sacred terrain. 

To walk the earth is to move one living organism across the living body of another. In this movement, two rhythms emerge: the beat of the heart and the pace of our steps. The heartbeat, primal and sonic, is first perceived within the watery womb. After birth, it becomes internal, less legible, but still present. The walk, however, is a rhythm we externalise. It is paced. It is audible. It is, in many ways, our first act of rhythm-making in the world. Our feet drum rhythms upon the land. In aligning with rhythm, we align with cosmic time, a sonic geometry: invisible yet profoundly structuring, grounding the body in time, and the soul in place. As we walk, we do not merely move across land, we become part of its remembering.

In earlier cultures, journeys were not just practical; they were spiritual. Rhythm, in this context, is a navigation system, both terrestrial and transcendent. Music was played and songs were sung to remember the way. The cadence of footsteps, the lilt of a melody, the tempo of a dance. These were mnemonic devices that encoded direction, destination, and devotion. Walking the earth and journeying through the inner world were entangled experiences.

If rhythm is encoded within us, inherited through blood and bone, then perhaps it offers more than memory. Perhaps it offers orientation. My own body reveals this: though raised in flat lands all my ancestors came from steep mountain areas. I am deeply comfortable in steep terrain. I do not stumble. I climb with ease. I am sure-footed in the mountains as if my body remembers a time, or a people, before me. Movement, then, is not merely learned. It is inherited.

And what I was seeking is suddenly revealed.

What if our bodies carry songs we’ve never sung? What if our gestures are archives, repositories of memory passed down through blood, bone, and breath? I began to wonder if our internal rhythm is not only our own, but the echo of ancestral songs, human and more-than-human, expressing themselves through us, often without our awareness.

This question became the foundation of a long-term project I initiated together with my collaborator Therese Westin. We call it The Archive of Gestures. Over the past four years, we’ve worked with migrants, refugees, and trauma survivors, engaging in a long-term performance project that explores movement as a pathway to memory, healing, and connection. 

One foundational practice involves offering spontaneous movements, often emerging from a need for release, comfort, or expression. Repeatedly, we found that these movements were not arbitrary. They reached back, into early childhood, into ancestral practices, into gestures of farming, sewing, caretaking, or cultural dances long forgotten. Some carried the memory of rituals participants had never formally learned. Others surfaced from places of longing, displacement, or generational silence. These were not merely physical expressions. They were archives, living memory encoded in the body, revealing what had been forgotten, avoided, or suppressed.

In these workshops, the body becomes both witness and teacher. It speaks a language older than words, a kinetic language of survival, adaptation, and belonging. The body holds the score, not only of trauma, but of inherited knowledge. It tells us where to move, what to release, and how to remember who we are.

Imagine a world where we are born into blankness, required to learn everything from scratch. It would be unbearable. But we are not blank slates. We are born into rhythms. Into movements shaped by thousands of years. Into bodies that have already learned how to live, move, protect, and care.

The Archive of Gestures became a way to honour this inheritance, but also as a tool for relational empathy. In mirroring and mimicking each other’s gestures, we enter their experience. We listen with our limbs. We reflect not only what we see, but what we feel. In this shared movement, deep connections were forged, often bypassing language altogether.

What emerges are movements that open gateways between now and then, between us and our ancestors, between trauma and transformation. As gestures arise, they bring with them insights, grief, wisdom, and the desire for release. We witness how the body, when allowed to speak, reveals what it longs for: alignment, remembrance, and movement toward flourishing.

These gestures are sacred cartographies. They are maps of resilience. They trace the pathways of those who came before, who survived so that we could move. In reclaiming these movements, we reclaim parts of ourselves. We do not just remember, we become the memory made flesh.

A vehicle for a seed.

Entering these states of kinetic exploration, gestural awareness and rhythmic play, the body quickly finds itself in trance. Movements loop. A gesture repeats again and again. Rhythm emerges not as performance but as mediation. Work becomes dance. A trance unfolds.

I began to notice how working the land mirrors this: repetition, tempo, the hypnotic cadence of care. One reaps or churns, bends and sows, hour after hour, always the same gestures, syncopated with the breath of the earth. You rock a child. You walk for hours. You sing while planting seeds. A rhythm lives here, passed through muscle memory, unspoken but deeply known.

In diasporic contexts, rhythm crosses oceans. A beat played in London can summon the spirits of the ancestors and thus the homeland. The body becomes vessel, acoustic, ritual, mnemonic. It collapses time. In our performance work, we’ve seen this: a single beat transforms a sterile gallery into forest, shrine, field, an altar.

I began to see this work as a circle. Not simply a choreography, but an alchemical loop. We begin in exploration, unraveling what has been buried. We move toward revelation. We birth something. And then we reflect on what was created, what was healed, what now grows.

Many of our participants are descended from farming communities, and so am I. This surfaced again and again, movements of tending, digging, carrying. Gestures of harvest and hope. In working with these kinetic memories, a collective desire emerged: to plant. To return to soil. To work with the elements, earth, air, fire, water, and with the beings who inhabit those realms. Not metaphorically, but alchemically.

There is nothing more alchemical than growing food. To place a seed in earth and transform it into sustenance is a form of spellwork. It is practical magick. To know what to plant, when to water, how to tend, is sacred intelligence. It is not just food that grows. It is us.

The body is the vessel that holds the seed. When we perform it, we remember. When we move, we record. When we plant, we heal.

To position the body as both auditory and metaphysical map is to place it at the center of survival, spirit, and somatic knowledge. Movement becomes the ritual through which the archive is remembered, reactivated, and rewritten.

We are always walking ancient paths, laid by ancestors who sang with their feet, listened with their hips, healed with their hands. The body, then, is not just a vehicle. It is the breath between past and future. It is rhythm made visible. An Archive of belonging.