Clips from two hour live, Lift & Launch EarthBodyBoat
event Oct. 15, 2020
Gripping confessional prose and luminous artworks. . . . Sipowicz’s vibrant art is one of the volume’s most arresting features. . . . The union of throbbing, ethereal color with tangled, earthy textures aptly conveys the theme of spirituality embedded in organic life. —Kirkus Reviews
Ahjo's level of heart-based truth-telling is what the world needs most right now. I'm forever grateful that EarthBodyBoat: Queer Journey of a Somatic Earth Artist made its way into my life! This beautiful book is a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. — Quinn Alexander Fontaine, author of Hung Like A Seahorse: A Real-Life Transgender Adventure of Tragedy, Comedy, and Recovery
The body, the land, the river, time. The breath and feelings of the queer and tender heart…
EarthBodyBoat is all these and a sneak peek into your favorite time-travelling, virtuoso-performance artist's private journal. As you prance across the landscape where art, body, healing and prayer intersect, never mind the grit n tears! Part body-ritual book of shadows, part dreamscape, part nipple-liberation handbook, read this when you are done done done with your boring corporate job, and ready to admit freely to your stardust nature. You won't feel so alone after. —Dr. Pavini Moray, somatic sex therapist, ancestral healing guide, doctor of Somatic Psychology, and host of Bespoken Bones: Ancestors at the Crossroads of Sex, Magick and Science podcast
Ahjo’s manipulated photos are beautiful, lush, and powerful. Watching them work unfold over time has been amazing, and reading the process makes them all the more intense. This work is truly transformational. —Erika Wanenmacher, artist and witch.
EarthBodyBoat's willingness to sink into the folds of flesh and examine the personal and universal stories that the skin holds is, simply, a beautiful endeavor. EarthBodyBoat is a season of discovery. —Emmaly Wiederholt, author of Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond
EarthBodyBoat is not so much a boat as an Ark. I felt my soul fling itself into as soon as I had it in my hands. It is an ark in which to survive the rising (and falling) waters of our time, and Ahjo is an artist/holy person/tit-flashing-crone whose dreams, footsteps, and visions whisper again and again a healing chant, "Our hands are wise. We only have to listen to what is beneath them." Through visionary self-portraits and somatic practices, Ahjo "makes visible through art what has been outcasted and hidden." With their journey as a guide, I created and entered my own earthbodyboat, began my own ritual, and became an apprentice to Ahjo's apprenticeship to body, art, and earth.
—Kyce Bello, editor of The Return of the River: Writers, Scholars, and Citizens Speak on Behalf of the Santa Fe River and author of a collection of poems, Refugia
EarthBodyBoat is a creative invitation to return home to the somatic language of the body, and listen to its deep wisdom. We enter into a dialogue between our own body and the body of the earth, along with the bigger web of the ancestral body. The somatic practices accompanying the chapters offer the possibility to inquire into one's own somatic field while connecting to the experiences of the author. This brings a deep breath and aliveness to this powerful book. As a somatic movement therapist and expressive arts practitioner, I look forward to introducing my clients to EarthBodyBoat. The Embodied Wisdom held in this book will be of great interest to body-based therapists, somatic researchers, and everyone interested in the inherent healing power of the breathing body and the creative process.
—Caroline Kleindienst, MA, Registered Somatic Movement Therapist
I first met Ahjo almost 30 years ago when they showed up at Tamalpa Institute for our yearlong training in the Halprin Life/Art Process. We reconnected when Ahjo came to the California coast and worked extensively with me for six months. It was a homecoming, and the beginning of a very primal transformation. The beach and woods became the medium for wiping the slate clean, reconfiguring and reforming the many puzzle pieces of their life through a somatic-expressive process of engagement with their inner landscape in relationship to the outer one.
Ahjo returned to the high desert with an altered inner ecosystem, and generated their own unique form of expression from the processes and maps we had explored together. Now, six years on, I am witness to this stunning amalgamation of memoir/performance/visual diary Ahjo has created. In this wonderful intersection of art, politics and self, Ahjo has come full circle—developing and expanding the Life/Art Process for a new generation of artists and activists.
—Jamie McHugh, somatic movement specialist and multidisciplinary artist
Press about EarthBodyBoat
So Many Wings Interview Dec. 10, 2020
“Join us for a conversation with Ahjo Sipowicz where we discuss their path into radical embodiment and the creation of their book EarthBodyBoat.”
Coming into wholeness as a neurodivergent, genderqueer creature
Meaning-making and integration after altered state experiences
Using scores and performance to connect with the earth and ourselves
Freeing the rivers dammed by patriarchy and colonialism
Croning, eldership and aging
Divination and art-making with an Iphone
Making a book to make community
Brave Space Interview Oct. 31, 2020
“Anjo Sipowicz & Quinn Fontaine go Beyond Gender in Their Conversation with Host Cecile Lipworth about Anjo's Book & Journey of Gender Self Discovery”
Some Serious Business - #fiftyquestions
Ahjo answers questions from the point of view of the three characters from the book, ErthBodyBoat
Stance on Dance Interview Nov. 2018 Being in Body in Nature on Earth
what is my current somatic/artistic practice
what is somatics
about writing
experience a score while reading