Keeping our bodily balance is a continuous performance, including the effort to keep the erect posture against gravity. However, since this performance remains strictly subliminal we become aware of the state of equilibrium only in the event of disruption: in the very moment we loose our balance, stumble and fall, or more generally, when the relation between the body and the surrounding world is irritated, disturbed, or interrupted as it is characteristic in the state of vertigo.
We use the term coalescence to describe a moment where a multitude of actors come together, act together, and merge into a collective movement, body, or unit. The resulting situation is a shared but divergent somatic, spatial and cognitive experience of togetherness that is experienced as fertile and generative by all or most of the collective.
More than ever before, our world appears to us as an animistic world, as a reality in which basically everything – things, plants, machines – can be experienced as animate in some form or another and, accordingly, as alive.