For All I Care: Episode 2 Distant Touch

Can we create a new language of touch to help us comfort and care?

In these hug-starved times, can we care without touch?

In this episode we think about what touch means, tune in to our surroundings and listen in order to be touched by sound.

Writer and academic Elizabeth-Jane Burnett discusses healing by connecting to place through touch as she reads from her work The Grassling, and new work in progress The Living Light about moss.

Dancer, choreographer and researcher Vera Tussing talks to social neuroscientist Michael Banissy about how we can have more open conversations about touch and about the complex and deeply personal responses we have to touch, touch and social bonds, wellbeing and connection.

Tune into your skin with artist and programmer Claire Tolan through ASMR or autonomous sensory Meridian response, which describes a physiological tingling sensation that can be generated by soft sounds. We’ll explore the tactile and emotional resonances of sounds that can help us feel the presence of others and tune in to our immediate surroundings.

A BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Wellcome Collection collaboration. Presented by Nwando Ebizie. Music by Nkisi. Sound by Axel Kacoutié. A Reduced Listening Production, produced by Katherine Godfrey and exec produced by Alannah Chance.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's The Grassling is published by Penguin and The Living Light will be released in 2021.