SSSSS| Staging Situated Sensory Somatic Sympoeisis
Lea Hejn
Anna Stempniewicz
SLORG (Sloped Organism Research Group) is a Copenhagen-based collective resisting a world flattened by the violence of modernity. We challenge how engineered landscapes sever our innate connection to the earth, proposing that our bodies hold an embodied, ecological knowledge essential for our future. Our concept of the "slorg"—the sloped organism—frames humans as co-evolved with an undulating earth, a state of being erased by centuries of control. Our work is a pedagogy for its reawakening.
Our methodology merges forensic architectural analysis with site-specific performance. Choreographer Lina Bondarenko translates our research into participatory movement scores. Production designer Anna Stempniewicz gives this inquiry material form, crafting objects from local flora. Documentary filmmaker Lea Hejn captures this process, weaving our research into cinematic narratives about ecological justice. Together, we create films and workshops that function as living archives—tools for reclaiming our role as collaborators with an undulating earth.
Our Collective:
Lina Bondarenko (Architect, Choreographer): An MIT researcher leading our urban analysis and performance pedagogy. Her work has been featured at the Venice & Tbilisi Architecture Biennales and AIA National Conference, and she has worked with Gehl Architects and BIG.
Lea Hejn (Filmmaker): Our cinematic storyteller. She was Assistant Director on the award-winning documentary Wilding (Apple TV) and HBO Max's Blue Carbon. Her short film Curupira was a Jackson Wild finalist.
Anna Stempniewicz (Architect, Production Designer): Creates the material culture for our work. Educated at the Royal Danish Academy, her experience includes renowned firms like BIG, Henning Larsen, and Junya Ishigami.
SLORG (Sloped Organism Research Group) is an interdisciplinary collective (Movement Artist, Architect, Filmmaker) resisting modernity’s great “flattening”—a process that erases the sensory complexity of sloped terrain, severing our embodied relationality with the earth and fostering apathy toward ecological crisis. We argue that humans are, and always have been, “slorgs”: sloped organisms, co-evolved with the inclines of the lithosphere. Our mission is to reawaken this forgotten, embodied knowledge.
Grounded in a feminist ecology of movement inspired by thinkers like Donna Haraway and Sara Ahmed, our methodology integrates three core practices:
Architectural Decoding: We use archival research and critical mapping to reveal how infrastructures function as instruments of social and ecological choreography.
Somatic Inquiry: We develop and lead "Social Sensory Somatic Scores" at each site—participatory movement explorations that generate embodied knowledge of the terrain.
Cinematic Storytelling: We weave the analytical, somatic, and anecdotal into compelling narratives that make the invisible forces shaping our world visible.
We propose to conduct our field studies within the cities of the LINA member organizations. Each of these locations is part of a watershed defined by slope—steep or subtle—and all have been controlled by infrastructural interventions that reflect modern values of extraction. As a result, they face environmental threats our methodology is designed to make palpable.
Through a feature documentary, a pedagogical toolkit, and a traveling exhibition, SLORG will provide tools for communities to resist erasure and reconnect with place. Our work asks: What futures become possible when we stop trying to conquer the slope, and instead, learn to dance with it?