Category: her memory, to be shared with you.

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.

My practice lives at the crossroads of the book and the classroom, where presence
is the essential material. So, when thinking of the harvest yielded by  changes after 2022, I find myself constantly learning that virtual materiality is not an absence, but a different kind of skin, one that opens a new lexicon of sense and cognition. It asks us to keep searching for meaning not in grand events, but in the daily, sensory iterations of connection: presence found in the synchronized breath and the solitary echo alike. In this search, the gesture becomes my compass. More than image, it is performance, a vulnerable architecture that allows sensitive dialogues to begin. And if the “body” is no longer a single geography, but a fluid concept, an identity playground, then the internet becomes a stage for new gestures to be born. These gestures are inter-textual, woven from many voices, a silent language waiting to be recognized. This is how we begin to shape a context. This is the quiet, vital work of building a community.