i’m lxo [elle-ex-oh] she/they, a trauma-conscious bodyworker based in london. i have a research-led artistic practice and work in welfare, safeguarding and personal access support.

my practice is lomi-informed and shaped by years spent in queer and kink nightlife, community welfare, activist and artist-led spaces; environments that taught me how care moves under pressure and contradiction, and how bodies arrive carrying more than words can hold.

i came to bodywork through movement practice, art and community care, alongside personal experiences of survival.

supported by scholarships and maintenance grants, i studied fine art at byam shaw and later curatorial studies at goldsmiths. there i developed a research practice investigating how relational and embodied approaches can unsettle colonial structures across artistic methodologies, archives, museums and exhibition spaces, and how queering identity, power and memory circulates through entangled forms of relation.

this led to collaborating with dr ben spatz on cryptoidentity as part of an extension to their judaica project, an embodied research inquiry into diasporic and decolonial jewishness, postmemory, archival remains and the search for jewishness beyond nationalism, whiteness and the nation-state. our work simultaneously deepened my understanding of care as inseparable from memory, relation, decolonial struggle and collective liberation.

for the last half-decade plus, i’ve worked in safeguarding, welfare, dungeon monitoring and harm reduction across queer, kink and sex-positive communities.

staying present with crisis, altered states and vulnerability has shaped how i understand consent, nervous system safety and relational care. i undertake ongoing training and regularly update my cpd.

this lineage of community-held survival lives inside the bodywork.

beyond the roles i worked, my own body carried memories of unsafe and unwanted touch.

slowness became the condition through which safety could be felt and autonomy returned.

this is the ground from which i’ve been working. histories gather in the body. through slowness, the possibility of feeling whole comes back.

i work with people across many identities and experiences.

at the same time, my practice centres black, brown and indigenous people of colour, the global majority, queer and trans+ communities, survivors, diasporic people, and those who feel underrepresented, misrecognised or unsafe in mainstream therapeutic spaces.

trans bodywork and holding touch is still under-researched. hormones, medications, surgical histories and sensory shifts mean each body arrives differently.

my practice is continually evolving through listening, learning and relationship, never assuming to know what every body needs. instead, I approach each session with sensitivity, consent, curiosity and openness to difference.

if you don’t identify with these experiences of marginalisation, you’re still welcome to work with me. what matters is an understanding of the values and political commitments that shape the space, and a willingness to enter it with care and respect.

i’m openly trans, femme, non-binary and neurodivergent. my family histories were shaped by the dismantling of jewish life through imperial, racial and nationalist projects.

one side of my family carries the afterlives of the inquisition: expulsions from iberian jewish-muslim worlds, forced conversion, migration, colonisation, reracialisation, and later survival through european genocidal violence. the other side carries the afterlives of galician pogroms in the early 1900s, where homes were burned and lives were taken. my great-grandmother survived one such fire while trying to rescue her baby through a broken window, leaving her arms permanently scarred.

these inheritances shaped my mother’s political formation in the 60s, later shaping my own. she became active in socialist organising, helped dismantle the 1965 alabama literacy tests designed to disenfranchise black citizens preventing them from voting, and joined the freedom rides alongside kwame ture after the 16th street baptist church bombing.

my understanding of jewishness is shaped by traditions of exile and doikayt: the commitment to struggle for dignity and safety where we are, rather than through nationalist redemption. these inheritances inform how i approach care as a relational and political practice grounded in anti-colonial, anti-fascist and anti-racist solidarity.

tikkun, as an exilic practice, is also inherited. my great-grandmother’s hands were scarred in a pogrom fire, and still she made beautiful folded belts from discarded food wrappers. sometimes i feel that lineage of care in my own hands: moving matchsticks through flame when collaging; offering touch through lomi. repair feels less like something i do, and more like something that moves through me. this continuity informs my understanding of repair as collective, embodied and historical.

free palestine
free congo
free sudan
trans liberation now
migrant justice now
harm reduction saves lives

anti-fascist anti-racist politics and care live together in this work.

(poster: radical emprints)

touch and justice is based in london, england.

modern england owes its existence to ongoing colonial and extractive relations around the world.

the rights of the peoples colonised by this country to live and work freely here, and to participate in the determination of its future, remain unceded.