How do languages and sensations interact? This was the provocation of the conference Multisensuality and Language, an online event that took place on November 14-15, 2025. Our team represented by Florence Logan (performance-maker) and Lavinia Hirsu (researcher) shared our emerging work in a presentation entitled: “Dancing with Nature: exploring multilingualism and sustainability through hyperlocality” on November 15, 2025.
Drawing on her rich experience, Florence shared some of the creative processes that sit at the basis of her practice and which we are drawing on to develop activities for primary school children in their multilingual environments. The activities aim to (re)connect children with nature and their own bodies, inviting them to explore how we “become” the world, how play can be generative of language-nature-culture, and how dance and other forms of performance can be forms of care and self-care. Through hyperlocality, we help children develop their observation skills, explore their sense of awareness, curiosity, and awe for their immediate spaces, we turn their attention to the edges of their school grounds, the meeting points of their bodies with the things around them, and the resonance of primary vital forces (such as water) from the human bodies to the elements in the natural world.
The conference was an amazing encounter of people, ideas and sense-thinking. We explored notions of language and meaning-making in contexts that brought in not only the human senses and sensuality, but also the often hard-to-perceive nuances and layers of being human in a world of signs and sign-making. We learned about urban smells, olfactory racism and smellscapes with Stephanie Weisman, language portraits and visualizing multisensory language experiences with Carola Koblitz, and doggolingo – a discursive digital approach to anthropomorphising canine behavior with Beata Bury. These are only a few examples of a rich programme that carved new spaces for touch, sight, sound, taste, gesture, emotion, word, and bodies sensing and marking the places we inhabit.
Photo Credits: @Florence_Logan