Category: her memory, to be shared with you.

Bhabha’s proposal on the Third Space is quite interesting because it speaks directly to our current crisis: the inability to question what surrounds us, our environments, contexts, relationships, even our kinships. We seem to be losing the capacity for a more reflective, critical way of thinking, for genuinely wondering about things. And that brings me back to the idea of curiosity, not from an innocent point of view, but from a deliberate, political one. Taking a good look at where you live, how you live, who you live with, and how you occupy places, just as Pope mentioned in his video about the crawling performance, from that place, we might begin to recover a curiosity that dares to pose questions.

In that sense, the third space as a philosophy is powerful: it allows us to question how much of our self-identity, our self-perception, and how we perceive others, is shaped by colonized histories, hierarchies, and politics. And it’s also worth noting that one of the most compelling critiques of Bhabha comes from a woman, which opens up the question of whether his proposal can actually translate into concrete agency. Can it manifest through direct action, even if just a grain of salt in the daily life of communities? How can it actively reshape this world through words?

We’re told we have personal freedom by sharing our thoughts and processes, through online interconnection, for instance, which some theorists call modern third spaces. These platforms could be sites of transculturality. But they’re not quite free. They’re controlled by First World interests, the colonizer’s power persisting, where our identities become products to keep selling. So in this context, Bhabha’s proposal often falls short. Because what’s happening now is that powerful nations aren’t just interested in selling us products, they’re using us as data. Data to understand what captures our attention, what fuels our consumption.

And this brings us to the politics of exhaustion: the more we consume (ideologically, spiritually, communicatively) the more we feel we can never have enough. We run out of space to develop new forms of curiosity, to question, to recover wonder. And those are the very foundations for building resistance and change.

So we must ask ourselves: can the Third Space truly be the place where difference happens? And when difference does happen, it’s not comfortable. It feels strange. You feel a kind of estrangement from yourself. Conflict emerges. And interestingly, communities (especially communities of resistance) are built by going through conflict, not around it. That’s something I haven’t found in Bhabha’s proposal. It leans toward ideological discourse, but what we need now is to recover storytelling practices, narratives rather than discourses. Not to build new ideologies, but to return to a philosophical attitude of questioning, of cultivating curiosity.

Another layer: Bhabha writes from a privileged position. His way of communicating the Third Space and Hybridity comes from that place, something we should read between the lines when engaging with his ideas.

Finally, one of the most important points I find in his work, perhaps between the lines, is that he suggests it’s not a priority to question the origins of the cultures that meet in the Third Space. For me, that’s problematic. Because if we’re to prioritize what emerges in that space, we cannot invisibilize where those cultures come from. They come from somewhere. And in many South American countries, the absence of memory practices is precisely what keeps history repeating itself. It’s the inability to process inherited trauma: the things that happen to us daily. That’s the crack where institutions, bureaucracies, and power slip in to normalize what should never be normal: living in endangered zones, exposed to violence, post-traumatic stress, chaos. Because chaos serves institutions, and their bureaucracies are structures that thrive on it. That, too, must be considered.

00:00:01

So this audio that I’m recording… it’s in relation to this wonderful documentary that I’ve just seen: Donna Haraway’s Storytelling for Earthly Survival. Um, well, I wrote down some ideas about this documentary. It’s basically her own thoughts and reflections, in dialogue with the interviewee of the documentary, relating to this idea of kinship. I was really touched because, in other words, I guess it’s what sometimes I’ve been naming. Naming, like, how to coexist and live with others, understanding the other as something that’s, uh, sometimes a canceled or not an accepted part within ourselves, but also how these different communities outside of what we already recognize as familiar exist.

00:01:18

So this can be an ‘other human.’ Other species, and other space, and other ecosystem. So what Haraway basically mentions in this documentary (there are too many ideas), are two that have impacted me now. On the one hand, how she proposes the best way of thinking, in our context right now, is through the practice of storytelling. And there’s something that I found really interesting when she mentions how the stories that we are most used to telling, that we are most accustomed to, are these stories surrounding killing, surrounding second births, surrounding the design or the presence of (primary) weapons. So in some way, they are stories that are not thinking about life. They are thinking about death, and death not in a transformative way.

00:02:26

And with transformative, I don’t necessarily mean optimistic, but this essential quality of Gaia, that intervenes in life and subsists and survives and is resilient, like the fungus. So she proposes that we kind of think of different ways of storytelling as a recovery of this lively part, these stories that are mostly based on the (quite obvious and not) life side of life. So, for example, she opens this gateway through these ideas into criticizing what has been going on with the history of philosophy as a discipline, and that we’ve been receiving this male perspective on philosophy, which is actually more of an attitude rather than just a discipline. So, from this history of philosophy, what we inherit…

00:03:25

…is this idea that the ‘second birth’ is something that happens after we die, and that this second birthing is actually what brings us into our most, let’s say, crystallized way of being. So she criticizes this because, for her, birthing is birthing. The first birth, as the male historians and philosophers would usually say, is actually a feminine verse. Because it’s like these motherly cycles of birth in nature, of forming life out of the compost, for example. Which is kind of like the death of certain life matters, but at the same time, it’s the nurturing of new life. So, it’s like thinking about the feminine fertile in the broader sense, and so on. So, it’s not thinking about the afterlife, but thinking about life now and in its different cycles.

00:04:24

So she thinks that when you sort of translate or transpose this idea onto words—the livelihood of thinking, which is what I believe, I think this is how she thinks of philosophy—then she mentions that this change of storytelling is important because this allows us to, um, care for a constant need of being a rebel, of insurrection, of revolution. In the matter that we would be refusing the paralysis of critique, uh, which is, um, like a place where we are in this stuck idea that the world is finished because we know how it works. But the world is not finished. The world is in constant holding and shaping, especially with uncertainties.

00:05:23

So, in that context comes the second thought that I really loved, and it’s about maybe a more horizontal way of dealing with what we’ve defined and felt and constructed around the concept of ‘relationships.’ And thinking on how the world relates, and its origins; its origins are brought from a logical point of view. When actually, relationships… it’s actually referring not only to the biological connections but also to these exchanges, these intimate intertwinings, that we have with people that are not necessarily a biological family. And that are not necessarily human, like for example, how she shares with us, through this documentary, her kinship with her dog, Cayenne. Uh, so in that sense, it’s really interesting because I want to keep thinking on how this connects with Lynn Margulis’s or Janine Benyus’s proposals, which are also women. Because what she’s trying to propose, through the idea of kinship…

00:06:32

…in dialogue and in contrast to relationship, is kinship. This, uh, possibility of building homes, building, um, spaces where there are reproductive systems beyond the biological. That spark through, let’s say, some sort of very deep affinities that we subtly share with others. Again, other humans, and again, other non-humans. And I love this idea because when I think of my affective relationships, and when I think, “Where do I come from? My difficult contexts, what has healed me?” I can think of human people. Mostly non-biological relationships. But I especially go to these kinships that I’ve had with non-human entities, especially my cats, especially my dogs, especially some of the spaces that I’ve visited. Uh, like for example, this contemplation of the sea. There’s one difference, to me at least, on being in front of the sea and just contemplating it…

00:07:51

…and there is another thing: to have the feeling that you have some sort of bond with the sea. So, putting that in the lens of Haraway’s proposal, I think it’s quite possible to speak about kinships with places, spaces, with nature, with non-human, with human. It’s interesting because when you think about the non-human, you also have to include the microscopic life that is in you, and the microbiotic as well. So, there is some sort of kinship: kinship in health, kinship in sickness or in illness. Maybe even try to approach it with different storytelling again, like Gabor Maté proposes in his book on relational health, for example. What perspectives do we have? Like a lens through which we see trauma, with, how do we…

00:08:43

…see illness and health? And maybe a step back would be thinking about these connections as kinships. But, well… In the case of Haraway, she’s more focused on life itself and, I guess, some sort of giving us tangible evidence of what happens outside, so we can understand what happens inside. Not only in the microbiological way of, uh, imagining that, but also in how our ideas, our thinking, our imagination intertwines itself to produce, to reproduce something different. So in that matter, this video, this documentary, I have some other ideas here around the importance of thinking also about the intimacy of inheritance, and where it is located, like in which big things or little things. And I think in this place, the concept of ‘realia’ shows up.

00:09:47

Because, as she mentions at the beginning of her documentary, it’s like the basket that she keeps at her home from this Native American community. Or, for example, the barking of her dog when she’s woken up and she’s confused because her dog is elder. So, what? Things from your daily basis are actually realia that evidence the intimacy of these kinships. Kinships that are built by present kin, but also the evidence of kinship out of this inherited stuff. So, what I found really touching when she was speaking about her dog was also how she reconfigures her sense of responsibility in the means that it’s basically a company. Accompanying the other with the consciousness of their differences, like for example when she mentions that her dog is old, but she is not as old as her dog.

00:10:45

So she is in the responsibility of accompanying her in those brief moments of disorientation due to an elder age. I find this really beautiful: how, besides proposing kinship and, behind that, storytelling, also thinking in those skin shapes that might not fit the description, like, might not fit the box. The different boxes that have been ready-made for us to just fill them in. What happens if we are out of the box? What happens if we are in the interstice of language? What happens if we are in the in-between of two categories, of two boxes? What happens then? And that’s where she proposes the odd-kin. And there’s this beautiful image, actually a short story that she tells at the end of the documentary, where she mentions about this girl, Camille…

00:11:44

And she mentions about the symbionts, which are like, uh, vital presences that you choose as some sort of companionship during your whole life. And this means that you can choose, for example, a human or a non-human. And in the story, she mentions how Camille chooses a non-human. And her non-human is a butterfly (I’m sorry—the butterfly? Or was it a moth? I can’t remember well, but at the end of the story, or the story in progress, she mentions how she wanted her face to be intervened). So, by accepting her identity and her body’s embodied performance or embodied being as female, she wanted a beard. However, she wanted that beard to be made out of the antennae of butterflies. So she does that. She decides to intervene in her female body like that.

00:12:42

So it’s interesting because then, herself (um, let’s say, in most parts, easy to recognize as a female presence, identity, or body) with the beard, kind of puts you in the spotlight of “What do you think that being is? What do you think Camille is?” And that’s where odd-kin show up. What parts of my symbionts do I pick as an important part for me to feel like I am in my essence, in my presence, in my identity? So, in a crazy way, I think… I don’t know. When I think of that as some sort of metaphor for what happens to me, to people in our daily basis, we are actually kind of like an affective Frankenstein. We are therefore a Frankenstein that speaks its own tongue.

00:13:42

Understanding the tongue, the language, as not only the oral one, the verbal one, but how do we communicate, how do we interact with each other? Which are our gestures? And which are our ways of healing, sharing something with someone else as part of this storytelling practice? Because at the end of the day, storytelling is communicating, expressing in more than just a rational or an effective way; it’s actually more of an affective one. And an intermodal one. So when that’s in action, a kinship can be activated because, again, we are like this Frankenstein. And that’s, I guess, how this proposal of Haraway comes a step further from what she once wrote in A Cyborg Manifesto, in which she questions these binary ways of seeing the world, these dualities at times.

00:14:37

And at the end of the day, they’re always in between, again, interstices where love is born, and life exists, and life coexists, and life keeps reproducing itself instead of just surviving. So I guess that’s for now. Lots to think about. I think it’s really touching because, then, trying to situate this as a new learning out of my master’s program in interculturality or intercultural practices, it allows me to think not only in a human-centered, self-centered point of view of how can I empathetically or sensorially or embodiedly connect with an other, but to actually go to a much more complex part of this. And recognizing that I stopped being just human nowadays. That we are in kinships where we are constantly modifying ourselves.

00:15:41

But unfortunately, maybe on a line of ‘like’ death and killing storytelling, instead of seeing that as maybe a more reproductive way. You know, thinking about the word reproduction: it’s about producing again, and that takes me back to the collective and community work. Because only in those places of kinships, only in those places of intimate relationships and exchanges, do we see how being tolerant of an other, how being accepting of the difference that the other brings and that the other that inhabits us in the idea of this Frankenstein, that’s the only space where something can be produced again. Because I produce it, I exchange it, the other one goes on with that, and so on and so on and so on. Like the domino effect, but even maybe more than that: like the echo when the stone touches the sea, and then an external stimulus affects a specific environment, and the specific environment reacts back, and then starts intertwining an effect and an affect of things.

00:16:52

So interculturality can also, and maybe what’s more needed now, and this also connects Haraway with Janine Benyus, maybe it’s thinking about interculturality in relation to those. To trying to ask ourselves: where do our kinships reside? And from those kinships, what are the Oddkin? Uh, how can I see them? What realia evidences them or manifests them? What parts of me are realia, perhaps, that evidence the inhabitants of an other human or non-human within myself? And how do I inhabit others as well? And how do we relate? So interesting to go beyond the biological that is our point of origin, but to see our process: a process of re-producing, of producing again and again and again, and transforming ourselves and the others and our context, is maybe through another type of relationship. Even thinking not about how do we connect, but why we connect. And that’s the point of kin. That’s the kin of kins.

Memory as a vast ocean, an embodied landscape that shapes and holds our beliefs and values. A threading of the unknown, the unsurfaced, the longing of reencountering.

Identity as mountains that guard (trans)formative vitality, and when the time is met, bursts out in sanguine liquid as glimpses of vulnerability.

Ecosystems born out of urgency and care, bridging experiences and processes, weaving community in cycles of recovering.

What is a map? As found in dictionaries: a) a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc., and b) a person’s face. So, in other words, a drawing that aids recognition. What could be a map, then?

Whenever I think of a map, I imagine delimited territories. Erratic lines made with certain precision and scale to help us locate things in a particular order. Nevertheless, when I reflect upon what a territory means, it is much more complex than just referring to a geographic amount of land and sea. In that matter, I think more of a geopolitical construct on which our identities are based and designed. So mapping is not just about establishing boundary lines, most importantly it might be about realizing how we organize certain elements and which places they occupy or inhabit in the map we are designing.

This takes me to my practice and how it holds a certain positionality I carry with me in my processes and methods. I guess I’d have to start off with trying to explain how the natural rhythm of my practice is. I feel it like the lines on my hand: random, unique, at moments clear, at times foggy. But also, I link it to the lines shaped by mountain chains, like the ones shaped by the Andes that cross all our South American territory. So, I like to see my work moving across people, then communities, so across my city and Peru, and hopefully more regions too. In this way, my boundary lines are rather flexible, like rubber bands, drawn with a tremor in my hands, a voluntary shaking that lets that line live. Maybe that’s why my practice is about dealing with complex thresholds such as individual or collective trauma: because the lines drawn by this kind of narrative are intense, powerful and vital, as well as part of our shared stories as Latin Americans and Peruvians.

So, trembling lines are erratic lines: imprecise yet alive. Like the life line present in our hands, according to chiromancy, but also like the silhouette shaped by mountains. Now, maps also lead me to imagine geographical accidents, again, like mountains. It’s funny to me to think how these geological formations are considered, in technical terms, “accidents”, because then it’s funny to think how “accidents” can be located in a drawn or designed surface like a map, which is definitely a planned representation of the place where our practices happen. This leads me to keep wondering how my practice is not something I’ve chosen, but something I’ve responded with, almost by accident, to a specific context. On that matter, what aspects of our practice are shaped by the accidents present, found or lived in our territories? How much of a practice was an impulse, nowadays, shaped into an affective and artistic methodology? While I keep unveiling challenging questions, I do feel and know my practice seeks that same quality of the unplanned, the emergent, the boundary that is not a wall but a massive, historical and beautiful fact: storytelling is an ancient practice of longing to reencounter with oneself and our tribes, in acceptance, in love, in curiosity, in desires to be and do better.

This leads me to question the very act of making. What acts of translation might I be performing when exercising my practice? What happens when we read a book or make a zine? Therefore, what is happening with the reading experiences in my community, the people who surround me (and not), whether they make zines, read them, or don’t? What kinds of acts of translation, of intermodality, of transpositionality, take place in this practice of the book arts? Thinking about this map assignment is opening up reflections surrounding the idea of how I can identify the ecologies of the book in my community: the intimate circuits of its movement, its quiet distribution, its collaborative creation, its hands-on production and its difficulties or absences. And in between it all, how do I feel, think and act on it? What’s my positionality towards a local book arts context?

It is here, in this tangible, accidental geography of paper and ink, that I find a system of references that can hold me. The zine, the photobook, the artist’s book, among others, they are not final territories but ranges to be traversed. They are where I can most honestly ask: What acts of translation sustain our authenticities? What tremulous, hand-drawn limits allow us to be, in and outside their margins?

Just came across some questions on my personal agenda: What structures support my authenticity? What boundaries allow me to be? Can I include authenticity in my sense of belonging? Can I feel that I am a variation within my system of references? In what ways do I feel transgressive or different?

What does it mean to be authentic in practice? I don’t know if I arrive with answers or truths, but this question makes me think about my way of creating and working. About how everything I do involves a complex, yet rewarding, opening of the heart. That is, I manage to stop residing in my head in order to give myself a space to feel with my hands: folding paper, writing, moving images on a computer to connect with what I’m trying to express from the suggestive silence of those narratives that are not oral or written. And that’s how I return to the meeting point with one of my cohort’s friend, who was just sharing his notes with me regarding the act of writing and the possibilities of translation that it entails. What do we translate when we write? What is trans-localized? As he mentions, I share his view that it is the affects that are relocated. That’s where the magic of the narrative act lies for me: the power to give a second chance to an other that resides within us.

So, this leads me back to think about one of the questions on my agenda: what structures support my authenticity? Generally, they are rigid categories we are born into. Methods of survival to not rock the boat too much in a context in crisis, where we try to be functional in the best way possible, aware that along the way not everyone will be performing in the same way, or with the same act of care. Nevertheless, we don’t stop trying. But at some point those categories break because they wound us, they judge us. That’s how I ask myself, if boundaries are healthy, how have I been learning them? They were taught to me as walls, but perhaps they are like mountains that can be crossed to reach new explored territories.

The mountains allow me to be. Throughout my practice they have made themselves present to remind me that my pace is not a problem, because like the haiku that speaks of the little snail crossing Mount Fuji, I too reach another horizon. That’s how my practice keeps transforming: it is restless, it is curious. It is not satisfied with something “well done”, but with something that can generate an echo of continuous molding, especially if it can be shared with others. The mountains are the geographic and affective space where I can reflect on what is working well and what could work better. This is where it sometimes gives way to a demanding character. The temperament of someone who believes they must suffer to achieve, for whom nothing is ever quite enough, and I consider this partly my cultural inheritance, a continuous dialogue, perhaps even in its most unforgiving aspects.

I was born in a context with possibilities and privileges, but affirming that does not imply denying everything that comes with growing up as a woman with migrant parents in a chaotic city: as wonderful as it is violent. In that sense, my first roots are situated in the fear of burdening others, of being a problem, of being weird and having no restraint. However, years later to the present day, I find myself somewhat different. I no longer stop doing things out of fear, rather I keep doing them because I love them very much. So, when I think about the question from my agenda: What boundaries allow me to be?, I address it with another question: “Where else could I find other roots?”. That’s how the transformation of my practice begins. Finding common nodes with strangers: those we meet in the space of a consultation, workshop, class, or creative accompaniment, a space where our completely foreign and differentiated contexts can coexist with kindness and weave a common language: the visual and editorial arts.

And it’s that I feel that when we are in front of a stranger, we become uncomfortable, because we find ourselves face to face speaking “the same language”: in this case, Peruvian. But, what happens when we enter an imaginal space where languages have no geographic or linguistic categories? What happens when what we share comes from a color, a scent, a sound, or a texture? Curiosity and doubt emerge. The desire to understand appears, and also the frustration of not feeling the same. But the arts are adaptive in essence, so we turn to another one to navigate the discomfort with intuition, and with that, perhaps turn the communicative restriction into an expressive possibility. In this way, it is possible to create meeting bridges, where we are seen in our most uncomfortable parts, those that sometimes rest in secret.

This is something that also sometimes comes to my mind: sometimes, when I am in front of someone I don’t know, I feel freer to share something that is very personal and uncomfortable to me, but that, of course, is also ready to come out. However, sometimes I find it more challenging to reopen something personal with someone I’ve known for years. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe someone else shares this same “mischief”, but it leads me to think about how there is a powerful and beautiful possibility to create safe and deep spaces to speak about the unspeakable among strangers, as long as we can have an anchor nearby, like when they teach you to swim and show you the gutter you can hold onto so you don’t feel like you’re drowning, while you start taking your first swims.

So, what is my authenticity? Is it a “what” or a “how”? I believe it is like the trunk of my tree that comes from multiple roots but branches out into many, many branches. Like the book that is inhabited by multiple narrative resources to be able to unfold diverse stories. That’s how I feel, live, and seek to create books: as bridges between the different, within me and between us as communities. That is why I see editorial practices as states of belonging. Like time-spaces for witnessing doubts and experiences that can be held as learnings (or their pivotal points). In this way, I don’t relate creativity to talent, because it has to do with a quality inherent to human beings, rooted in their openness and ability to respond to diverse environments or contexts of crisis. This connects me to the question of if I can feel that I am a variation within my system of references? I confess it’s something I’m not sure about and I don’t know if I ever will be 100% sure (something to perhaps keep revisiting later), but I do have to recognize that I am in a continuous process to better understand and propose editorial practices as another type of affective environment, because I think that books (such as manuscripts, quipus, engraved stones or wooden tablets, canvases, logbooks, notebooks, and diaries) have historically been and continue to be an important repository of personal gestures imprinted in that creative response, previously mentioned. That’s the meaning of artistry for me. And that’s the mindset surrounding the arts that I’d like to rehabilitate in the world, as many others are already doing it. After all, building communities with artistry is doing so by bodily interconnecting with others by a purpose, a question, a search, an initial curiosity that will or might navigate through similarities, conflict, change, yet hopefully keeping the same horizons.

So, in what ways do I feel transgressive or different? Like an image I saw once: remaining kind and tender in a world that is often cruel. Trusting. Trying. Hoping. I guess constantly taking care of the child in me that allows me to turn a limit into a guideline, rather than a wall, one that leans me towards curiosity by questioning the shape of things and how chaos can be a fun, emotional and authentic way of seeing them from another point of view: the one of a “stranger”. And books are the threads that aid not losing that image: new, different, complex, yet beautiful because it’s necessary, kind, compassionate and freeing. So an image, created and cared, to be witnessed along others. 

• Notebook of processes:
  
  Dialogue is at the center of accompanying processes, so I’m always taking free notes I can later reread to order my thoughts based on three questions:
  
  a) What’s being expected?
  b) What’s needed?
  c) How could I help?
  
  This helps me recognize the extent of what I can do as a facilitator and what the participant must do on their own to reach what they are searching for. It’s also important that I am always looking to hold and shape expectations toward becoming searches.

• Foraging archive:
  
  I always think that the primary material for any sort of personal or collective creative process begins—or is sparked by—searching within. Therefore, a personal archive, whether old or recent, is very important for understanding the context of our questions and the purpose of what we’d like to create. With it, we have a starting point from which we can decenter and dive into the process. I think of these as emotional, yet tangible, anchors that emerge as allies in a process that will (safely) tap into the unexpected or the uncomfortable, but necessary.

• Dialoguing with the uncomfortable:
  
  I see this as essential, though not from a morbid perspective, but rather as an opportunity to search and contemplate beyond what we take for granted or how we’ve maintained certain perspectives—individually or collectively—on themes we want to work with in our creative processes. Active listening is important to register what a participant brings when sharing or discussing certain topics: what words they use, what gestures, body positions, voice tones or volumes. This can even help reveal practices in their daily life that are important yet not fully recognized, which may help them understand something challenging to share that holds a crucial piece of personal identity—a narrative that could expand to illuminate a sociocultural issue.

• Periodicity as caring:
  
  I think it’s important in my work to maintain periodicity—that is, consistency in scheduling meetings (for example, once a week, at roughly the same time or day). This helps build an ecosystem of care, offering physical and emotional reassurance that we will meet again during a process that might bring frustration or uncertainty. These feelings are important to sit with, not necessarily resolve, though I do provide some guidelines so participants can navigate their processes with full autonomy, exploration, curiosity, and doubt—trying and finding their own resources and strategies. In my experience, this has been possible thanks to the “promise” of seeing each other again in a week.
  
  Before establishing this rhythm, we first have an initial meeting to check our chemistry, introduce ourselves, see how we might work together, and determine the amount of time needed or manageable to reach a final piece or closure of the process. This applies to one-on-one tutorials, but in a workshop setting it shifts to an orientation talk or session where information is shared, which can also reassure individuals interested in participating. The workshop is then structured into sessions, but I try to leave an asynchronous week with no classes, during which participants share a final draft before submitting or presenting their completed work.

• Creating an ecosystem of work:
  
  Making the space comfortable. This ranges from curating playlists to accompany certain guided experiences or activities, to gathering references and texts that can serve as catalysts for questioning, especially at the beginning and midpoint of the process. It also means turning the workshop studio or classroom into something more home-like: inviting students or participants to move desks aside if they’d like to sit on the floor (space permitting), and keeping various creative tools within reach—scissors, pens, pencils, colors, glue, post-its, masking tape, clips, blank paper, etc.—along with something to eat or drink so people can help themselves when needed (cookies or other snacks on a table, glasses, a jar of water, juice, coffee, and so on).
  
  The most essential part of this is the check-in moment: we don’t start directly with the session’s agenda, but take a few initial minutes to see how everyone—including the facilitator—is arriving. This allows the workshop to tune in subtly yet meaningfully to the participants’ states and to adapt the plan if needed. It also helps build a safer, more trusting climate, which makes it easier to sustain frustration or other complex dynamics within the group—and to turn the group itself into a resource, rather than positioning the facilitator as the sole problem-solver or “savior.”

Thinking through practice: How can memory act as a lens to reflect on this? How does this re-signify my hands as a space? What kind of body does my frustration become?

We have been foraging through sources on storytelling. This week, we engaged with the works of Joseph Campbell and Matthew Dicks, tasked with identifying biases in their approaches to this complex, yet wonderful, narrative art. By dialoguing with their ideas and reflecting on how shared experience enacts a performative sense of belonging, I began to navigate a series of questions.

Campbell’s model of the “hero” who conquers “underdeveloped” parts of the self reveals a moral discourse that strikes me as potentially pretentious or idealistic. Why must we sacrifice an elemental part of ourselves (a part deemed “wrong” or “immature” by a moral standard) for some abstract “greater good”? If experience-based learning is foundational, then our earliest identity-shaping experiences are crucial to understanding how we became who we are. Therefore, the complete denial or suppression of these parts through a heroic-ritualistic process can be dangerous, problematic, and ultimately hurtful. Perhaps it is more about relocating that archetype or dialoguing with it. This draws my attention to the inherent bias within the very concept of “sacrifice.”

This is not to promote individualism or a narcissistic viewpoint, but to argue for seeing the self as an interdependent core, around which others orbit and are orbited in turn. Furthermore, if mythology is built upon archetypal narratives, what becomes of the vast diversity of other archetypes?

Shifting to Dicks’s suggestions for capturing fleeting daily moments, I find he largely overlooks contexts of high stress. His proposal, sadly, lacks any mention of this. He does not consider how to adapt the assignment for cultural contexts where priorities are different, and the rhythm of life is so intense that there is no time to write, for example, five pages about one’s day.

What if, instead of or alongside “compromise” and “faith,” we were to focus on hope? How can we practice hope, not as an abstract concept, but as an identitary practice that sharpens our perception of these moments? How can we apply this “homework for life” when the day feels endless? Is the goal merely to feel “better,” or is it to notice something fundamentally different?”

I’m starting to understand why I’m interested in the gesture language of my hands: because that is the bodily-space where I noticed for the first time my Cocoliche’s (my dad) most vulnerable side: his anxiety (and how he copes with it, just like me). This is a part of my affective heritage.

I’ve long-lived with an injured arm, one injured by someone who I love and still do (although we’re healthfully changing). Now that I’m reading about the importance of somatic sense, touch and the nuclear role of the hand in the practice of touch, I’m wondering about the paradox of it having some receptors, like nociceptors, that feel pain. So, I’m wondering, if my hand could express what she felt or thought of when being violated, what would she have to say? Or how does the rest of my body still live within that silenced expression? Is it still silenced? What aspects of my nowadays touch comes from a place of violence or fear, or how has it shaped towards faith and safeness? Is it possible, then, to change our language of love through touch? Change it from its institutional hierarchy to search for a more heart-opened, difference-tolerant, way of witnessing and listening to each other, to just be (together)?

Which is the path of the heart? Where does it go? How does it keep going? Maybe its footprints are like personal flags which keep the trace on which our boundaries are built. Now, this has always been an issue for me: as a kid I wasn’t able to fully understand boundaries as healthy identity practices, but would see them as bricks to build up thick walls. But this week’s group encounter was able to gift me a different way to see them, a perspective I’ve been thankfully able to harvest from my last years in therapy.

So, this made me think of how each brick builds, instead of a protective wall, a huge canvas in disposition for diverse storytelling acts. Therefore, these bricks can also build bridges thanks to the presence and usage of languages in all its modalities. What is most important is to create from the inner, deepest feelings. In this way, some experiences can be unblocked, hence, can be part of a critical fable: one in which we can have the chance of unveiling or resignifying truths.

Not quite sure if I can answer this, but one of my clues is play. Play as a platform for social inclusion, as a way to accept others, but especially the “others” within myself. Maybe this can be an opportunity for opening conversations of love: ones in which we can sensitively embrace vulnerability, while connecting present, past, and ancestry into an embodied wisdom. One through which we might heal.

When thinking about the path of my heart, I guess I can tell where and when it started, but I have no idea of its future directions. Just hoping they are different from the ones I’ve known. As long as I and we can all get a diverse amount of unpredictable and unexpected experiences, I believe there is a chance to repair the heart’s way of being. And that’s exactly the thing: it is not about making things better, but different.

A home is more than just a physical space. It is a performative extension of our politics, cultures, philosophies, spiritualities and affections: all of which shapes who we are. Therefore, as it can be found within the word “performance”, it’s all about the forms we need to be, to live, to feel the spark of existence. This might be the reason why home is a safe temple of self. So, it’s about feeling love towards the forms that are guarded by homes, forms that also feel like perforations at times, because similar to what Barthes defined as “punctum” in photography, these forms can only be exteriorized when tapping and dialoguing with special parts of our vulnerability.

So, how can we find those forms? How do we identify them? My proposal is to contemplate the day to day small gestures, as the ones performed by our hands, that tell an important amount of information about someone or someplace. Thinking on how the hands move, are used, or rest can be a way of holding, shaping, letting go and holding again all of the heart’s paths and their new ways to coexist, witness, share and love.