Corpo Consapevole: Listening to the Body in a World That Wants to Control It
- Greta Futura Langianni
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
In a society where the body is constantly observed, measured, and performed but rarely felt, Corpo Consapevole emerges as a space for slowing down and listening inward. What began in 2019 as a personal visual diary by Marika Zaramella, gradually evolved into a collective exploration of embodiment, creativity, and emotional awareness that’s opening its door to us for the first time on March 19th in Milan.
When did you start Corpo Consapevole, and what was the intention behind it at the beginning?
I started Corpo Consapevole in 2019. It was a kind of personal finsta where I posted pictures of my body, monitoring it through images. I felt that there was something deeper in the way I experienced myself as a woman, that in the way I showed, depicted, or interacted with my body there were many unspoken messages that I wanted to uncover. Why was I exerting all this control over my body? Where did it come from?
Femininity always felt like a performance rather than my real expression. It felt like playing with my image, with my perception of it and with that of the spectator. By documenting, externalizing that need, and questioning it, I was unlocking my creativity and freedom without even knowing it.
I was slowly detaching myself from a rigid definition of who I was, from fixed ideas of femininity, and from a static sense of identity. Exploring my body and its representation opened a creative vortex where suddenly everything became fluid, making space for body, mind, spirit, nature, ecology, and much more.
It started like that, and it developed into the healthiest obsession I have ever had with myself. In the beginning, self-care looked like taking care of my exterior, and all of a sudden I found myself in the midst of an ego death and at the beginning of an almost spiritual inner journey.
Dancing, playing, creating, crying, feeling it all.
I felt that my body held many of the answers I was looking for, and that by looking within I was finding what I had always thought could only be found outside.
I would say that this project has been a documentation of my self-discovery through the years, until I decided to transform it into a platform and offer the same tools to other people.
I don’t think I have arrived anywhere, nor that I have found something to teach, honestly. I feel that this is just the beginning of something that, for once, fits me well.
I see Corpo Consapevole as an opportunity for a shared journey of infinite self-enjoyment, one that could be enriched by many new encounters. Isn’t that the point of being alive? I need to live while searching for meaning, according to my ever-evolving values and shapes.
My inner world is so rich, and so is that of others, waiting to be explored and transformed by souls willing to share it.
I don’t want this project to be strict or static. I need it to stay fresh, faceless, nomadic, full of artists and creatives to be inspired by.
What led you to expand it from a personal, self-reflective practice into a physical and shared space?
A few years ago I was going through a creative burnout. Working with social media and in the marketing industry made me feel somehow exploited of my creativity, my spark, and my whimsy. I also felt like I had changed a lot in the last few years. Behind the scenes, my life had gone through profound inner revolutions, and somehow I felt trapped in a virtual reality and in a public persona that didn’t feel like mine nor representative of who I was.
I have always hated performative interactions and small talk, yet somehow my reality was full of that, and I constantly felt like I was in the wrong place. I needed something to reclaim my creative spark.
A friend suggested that I follow The Artist’s Way, a book that is sort of a creative rehab. While I was doing it, I started to understand how creativity is deeply related to healing for me, and how the guidelines of the book were reminding me of my own healing process during those long years that felt like a Neptunian nebula — without space, time, or direction, just a dense fog.
But when you’re in the fog, you can’t see, so you have to develop other senses — your intuition.
I felt lost for almost the entire program. I felt very wronged by myself: “Am I really an artist? I feel like an imposter. What if I don’t have a clear dream? What should I do? What if everything I knew about myself is gone and now I’m left with a blank slate? What should I follow, and why can’t I see my path? This should reveal it to me, but I feel like it’s not working. Maybe I’m broken. Maybe I’m not creative and I have no ideas anymore. Maybe it was just a little kid’s manic episode that went too far.”
I remember writing endlessly: “I don’t know what I’m doing, but…” and I kept doing that until one day I felt a tingly sensation while I was at a sound healing event. I was able to imagine again.
After that, I feel like I haven’t been able to stop anymore.
I realized that I want to be of service. My creativity is a medium, and I need to see other people enjoying themselves in order to imagine a better world. I want to build a shared playground. That’s the only contribution I can offer, and that is my biggest creative gift.
That’s how I decided to start the first event of Corpo Consapevole with a sound healing session.
What shifts when body awareness becomes a collective experience rather than an individual one?
I felt a weird, inexplicable feeling when I took my first somatic course. What you can discover about yourself in a room full of people doing the same work on themselves can be a crazy, almost futuristic experience, because other people become amplifying, transmitting devices.
You reach a kind of flow state that is already huge inside you, and it expands even more through their presence. I think it’s one of the closest things to magic that my body has ever experienced. And I’m the furthest thing you can imagine from an extroverted person.
It literally rewired my perception of connection, the scale of my emotions, my view of the past, and my hope for the future.
How do you differentiate between genuinely listening to your body and attempting to control it?
What I’ve learned from my big emotional mess is that when something is not felt, it will drive me crazy in ways that are far from who I really am.
So the only thing I do is notice when I’m about to spiral into obsessive negative thoughts or predictions of worst-case scenarios, and intentionally shift my attention toward things that are actually in my control in the present moment, things I can act on.
In the beginning it feels impossible, but your brain learns from you.
You can’t fully control your mind or your body, but you can build a more secure relationship with them. When my body or mind feels strange, I know it’s probably time to move or to cry. It’s my body gently asking me to feel, and ignoring it or trying to only verbalize it won’t solve the equation, the emotion stays somewhere, waiting to be felt.
Emotions and thoughts flow like waves. I can let some of them pass.
I don’t spend as much time in my head as I used to, constantly verbalizing or trying to understand what I’m feeling as if everything had to make logical sense. Sometimes it simply doesn’t, and that’s okay.
Not everything is understandable rationally. I allow uncertainty to exist.
What is the most significant difference in how you relate to your body today compared to when you were younger?
I think the biggest shift has been learning to let myself feel intense emotions without needing a logical or tolerable explanation for them to exist.
I think talk therapy is a valuable tool that helped me detach from many things that once felt too hard to deal with, and sometimes it’s deeply necessary simply to be listened to. It can be very useful for many people, but for me it feels like an incomplete tool. I can be very much in my head sometimes, to the point where I feel disconnected from physical sensations.
The world is already full of opportunities to detach, and our current lifestyle makes us very brain-oriented. The mind is glorified, and scientific approaches often seem to be the only ones widely accepted. But we also have a body, and we still feel it even when we try to rationalize every aspect of our lives.
Exploring other experimental practices that keep me present, where the body becomes the primary medium for feeling, has allowed me to step outside my own made-up stories and become more open to whatever is arising. It has allowed things I used to repress or hide from myself to finally be experienced.
I feel much lighter now.
Writing as a daily ritual also works wonderfully for me to maintain a sense of mental balance, or to restore it when needed. Some days it feels very difficult to return to a balanced state, but that too is part of the process. We don’t have to be regulated all the time...this is something I’ve had to unlearn.
Not everything can be fixed quickly.
In what ways does social media shape how we inhabit, observe, and perform our bodies?
I think it depends on how you use it. Of course social media promote certain body standards, but it’s not that different from TV or other media channels.
The difference is that social media are made by users like you. If you exist, you can find something similar to yourself. Social media are also less passive and more manageable than TV or traditional advertising. If you don’t let the algorithm choose your content and shape your narrative, you can decide what you want to consume.
For example, you have agency over the kind of people you interact with, the bodies you see, and even the political perspectives you expose yourself to.
We should be aware of that and consciously choose what feeds the healthiest version of ourselves that we want to embody, instead of feeding our insecurities.
And this applies to everything we consume or buy.
Do you see body awareness as a political act? If so, how?
Yes, I do. Everything is political. Especially as a woman, my body is even more so. The labor it produces is political. Rest is deeply political because it stands in contrast to labor, productivity, and the capacity to generate profit for the system. The restrictions I choose to place on my body are also political.
When a person is pushed to focus excessively on controlling their own body, they can develop a kind of inner isolation. Implanting the idea that someone must constantly monitor themselves is one of the most effective ways to place them in a state of self-surveillance, control, and anxiety.
This condition creates people who feel inadequate and submissive to a system that does not accept them. Yet we all need to belong, because we are mammals too, even if we like to think of ourselves as something outside of nature and superior to it.
This psychological mechanism can make us more vulnerable to ideologies that separate us from “the other” and control us. The rigidity of internal control and surveillance becomes familiar, something our brain begins to perceive as almost reassuring, even if it is oppressive.
Fascist ideologies, for example, both historically and in the present, have always exerted control over the body. Women in particular are reduced to vessels meant to produce the next generation of “pure” citizens, enslaving their bodies to reproduction. Thinness becomes a moral imperative. It signals dominance over the body and alignment with European beauty standards, outsourcing our taste, our appearance, our preferences, and our autonomy.
This emphasis on thinness is itself a form of supremacy: thin bodies over fat bodies, white bodies over Black bodies, cisgender bodies over transgender bodies, and able bodies over disabled bodies. Conformity is imposed, and difference is punished.
Control extends to the mind and spirit, suppressing autonomy and constructing a false sense of belonging that is exclusive, rigid, and violent. We become so vulnerable that we even begin projecting the idea of “protection” onto authoritarian figures.
It is crucial to understand these dynamics in order to recognize how dangerous and pervasive such ideologies can be.
What does it truly mean to look at your body consciously? And how does vulnerability influence that process of becoming more aware?
For me it means accepting my flaws and deconstructing an imposed narrative that wants me to exist as an object of desire instead of as a vessel of creativity, enjoyment, and magic. It means accepting that I can be “mid” at something, that I don’t need to participate in any competition in order to look or feel valid.
It means taking accountability instead of projecting my fears outward or onto someone else, understanding that this is crucial in how I see the world, how I participate in it, and how I interpret it, also politically.
If I’m not aware, insecurities can become a weapon and find comfort in the darkest places.
We need to become a generation of bodies that overcome the need for ego self-satisfaction, able to prioritize a sense of self that is functional for the collective — one that can exist without the exploitation and domination of nature and all beings.
Photos: Sara Lorusso
Styling: Vittoria Santarelli
Styling assistant: Lizeth Fernández (@lizethfernandez_)
Styling assistant: Lucía Gordo (@lgrd_)