Exiled from our bodies: How to come back to our senses

By Tereza Stehlíková

My book Exiled From Our Bodies: How to Come Back to Our Senses is officially out!

In a world increasingly filtered through screens, Exiled from Our Bodies: How to Come Back to Our Senses (Routledge, 2025) makes the case for returning to lived, embodied, multi-sensory experience as an antidote to the personal—and ecological—alienation of digital life. My new book is out—the culmination of many years of artistic research across film, installation, and performance.

Drawing on my artistic practice and conversations with thinkers and practitioners, I explore how the arts can subvert passive mediation and help us re-learn reciprocity between body, technology, and environment—so we can feel and inhabit the world more fully.

“Effortlessly synthesizing the most interesting research currently underway in the study of sensory perception, while exploring the blunting influence of various technologies, Stehlíková uses her own life and artistic practice as a throughline connecting a splendid panoply of embodied insights.  An intersensory and interdisciplinary feast, the book will likely induce a fine derangement of the reader’s senses”. 

– David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology 

“Exiled from our Bodies is a strongly and clearly argued reminder that the arts continue to be grounded in our deep sense of being and the activation and interplay of all our senses. All arts express and mediate our relations with the world and the critical views of this writer apply in the entire realm of the arts. The argumentation is rooted in the author’s personal convictions in the cultural and human values of art, wide reading of relevant literature and her personal exchange through years with thinkers, scholars and artists in the cultural and human meanings of art”.

– Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and former professor, Helsinki University of Technology

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has been part of this journey—from my Royal College of Art days and Crossmodalism collaborators to the more recent PQ: Prague Quadrennial projects and the Tangible Territory community. While it’s impossible to name everyone here, I want to thank Jan Švankmajer, whose life’s work ignited my fascination with tactility, and Professor David Howes, an extraordinary editor who also contributed a beautifully evocative foreword.

The book’s topic is something I feel deeply invested in, particularly now, as we hurtle ever deeper into a world of AI generated content. I therefore really hope it will be read by those who would find it of interest.

Available now (eBook + hardback; paperback to follow) from Routledge, Amazon, and other booksellers (for 25% discount please use this code EFOB25, valid till end of 2025)
🔗 https://www.routledge.com/Exiled-From-Our-Bodies-How-to-Come-Back-to-Our-Senses/Stehlikova/p/book/9781032864044