Dignity Through Touch / Collaborative Sisters is a group of 6 women members of ESREA European Society for Research on the Education of Adults / Life History and Biography Network:

Berit Bareksten, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway
Inger Helen Midtgård, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway
Gaia Del Negro, Independent researcher collaborator, University of Milano Bicocca
Silvia Luraschi, Independent researcher collaborator, University of Milano Bicocca & University of Bergamo
Donata Puntil, King's College London, UK
Hazel Wright, Visiting Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, UK

 

Our collaborative autoethnography between six researchers (two from Italy, two from Norway, two from UK) started following a workshop held during ESREA / LHBN, in March 2021:

An Ecology of Life and Learning: Discourses, dialogue, and diversity in biographical research

ESREA/LHBN 2021, University of Lower Silesia Wrocław, Poland 

Title: Memories and dialogues within auto/biographical research. Listen and learn through poetic voices and performing in private and public life – a methodological approach.

Berit Bareksten (sociologist and storyteller) and Inger Helen Midtgård (Assistant Professor and social worker), Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (workshop session)

 

And it is continuing.

We have come together during the Pandemic to share specific stories about individuals whose life events have resulted in a loss of dignity to see what, as adults, we can learn from each other and how this learning might be transformative for our daily lives.

By sharing our stories – a form of collaborative autoethnography – we are striving to capture the essence of dignity and how it (or its lack) manifests in everyday life, particularly for the elderly and unwell who lack the resources to demand the rights and respect they deserve and have earned.

In this group we want to put our stories together in order to learn from each other small ways to act out of the box and celebrate love and trust through touch.

 

We work both online and in presence. In 2022 we met all 6 for a writing retreat in Norway:

blog part 1: Gaia Del Negro & Silvia Luraschi, Kollektiv mobilisering https://cupola.no/2022/12/15/walking-an-article-from-kollektiv-mobilisering-part-1/

blog part 2: Berit Bareksten, Walking an article https://cupola.no/2022/12/15/walking-an-article-part-2/

blog part 3: Hazel R. Wright, Walking a lifescape https://cupola.no/2022/12/19/walking-a-lifescape-lifewalk-i/

blog part 4: Inger Helen Midtgård, To present the things I really care about https://cupola.no/2022/12/19/to-present-the-things-i-really-care-about-lifewalk-ii/

 

We presented our collaborative writing at conferences: 

  • Macramé of thoughts about touching, non-touching, to be touched and intimacy, ICAE 2022 'A Right to Roam' conference, University of Bristol, 18-19th July 2022
  • Dignity through touch – in times of pandemic. Creating spaces for caring relationships, ESREA/LHBN 2022 'Encountering the Other: Biographies, Spaces and Relationships in Adult Education' conference, University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw, Poland, 3rd-6th March 2022

 macrame 1

We have an academic article around Dignity Through Touch, Possibilities Lost and Found During the Pandemic, which we hope to publish one day!

 

Sunday, 06 October 2024 13:25

HYBRID WOMEN

HYBRID WOMEN is a feminist, fierce and feeling collective bridging Italy and the UK.

Dr Alice Bell, Senior Lecturer Fine Art, Deputy Head of School of Creative Arts, University of Lincoln
Dr Gaia Del Negro, Independent Researcher, University of Milano Bicocca
Dr Silvia Luraschi, Independent Researcher, University of Milano Bicocca & Lecturer in Pedagogy at the University of Bergamo
Ms Marina Sossi, Independent Artist, London

We work with adults in education, enabling deep transformational encounter through multimodal arts practices; spiritual, somatic, and playful. We inhabit relational spaces wherein processes of unlearning, becoming and emancipation occur co-affectively.

We work mainly online to overcome our geographical distance.

In 2023 we met in Croatia to participate in the Artfulness conference, 23-24 September, with a workshop "Building a Boat for Tempestuous Times" and a video presentation "Stories of Sirens not Semen: Hybrid Women with Bodies of Birds, Heads of Humans and Souls of Love"

During the workshop (which was meant to be at the seaside and then was turned online due to conference logistic issues), we shared our practice, bringing awareness to precarious situations and beliefs. By honouring the traumatic, we transmuted this art-fully and care-fully into something more powerful, beautiful, owned: "our rebelliousness challenges that which is no longer ‘of service’, resourcing ourselves and our collaborators with richer pedagogies for life".

Our video presentation won the Artfuless Croatia 2023 conference prize for The Bravest and the Most Rebellious Presentation.

Hybrid Women prize

You can read more below (open access):

We produced a second video with material filmed during our meeting in Croatia that was selected for the Out of Site on the Streets: Live Arts Festival, September 28th-29th 2023, within the FLOW International Performance Art Symposium. It was shown live in Chicago and Rotterdam, and live streamed online on 28th September 2023.

The video can be watched on the YouTube channel of the Experimental Sound Studio. 

---- watch here [minute 1:39:22] https://www.youtube.com/live/gjBwXUf_Bvo?si=OLPgK59EMtZbDN3x&t=5963

 Hybrid Women Out of site Festival

Photo: Alice Bell, Out of Site on the Streets: Live Arts Festival, September 28th-29th 2023, live streaming of Hybrid Women, 28th September 2023.

 

“Mi accorgevo che meno sapevo, più sperimentavo.”

I realised that the less I knew, the more I experimented.

(Candiani, 2021, pg. 8, our translation)

 

In today’s complex societies where multiple languages and modalities are simultaneously used for communication and learning, a question is how to develop enhanced literacies that can support individuals and communities to meet each other and dialogue across diversity. 

For these reasons, although we are not expert in linguistics, I took the chance to become member of The Experiential Translation Network, a group of international scholars, artists and translators who investigate translation between languages (interlingual) and between media (intersemiotic) as a method of creation and communication, as a method for learning and teaching, collaboration and participation within multilingual, multicultural and multimodal settings.

The project "Experiential Translation: Meaning making, engagement and agency across media in a multimodal world", King’s College University, 2020-2022, aimed at developing practice-based methods for participatory workshops that took place from April 2021 to July 2022 in network countries (UK, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Hungary, Italy & Hong Kong) and were conducted by network participants working in scholar-artist teams.

In Italy, my colleague Silvia Luraschi and I partnered with the artist choreographer Cinzia Delorenzi to conduct an experiential translation of her solo performance Ospitare and of two poems by the contemporary poet Antonella Anedda. We called our local project Ospitare / Hosting others.

You can read more on the ETN website blogThe invisible process of research , Ospitare / Hosting others workshop 2 , Hosting others: translating in Canada

We published one academic article (Open Access): 

  • Del Negro, G., Luraschi, S., Delorenzi, C., & El Saadany, D. (2022). Ospitare/Hosting Others: Looking for Traces of Transformation in Adults Through Somatic and Artistic Relational Work. Teraźniejszość–Człowiek–Edukacja, 24(2 (92)), 9-30. ISSN PDF Open Access: 1505-8808 https://insted-tce.pl/ojs/index.php/tce/article/view/500/448

 

Silvia and I keep spreading the seeds of this project.

In 2022 we toured UK, Norway and Canada:

  • Gallery talk: Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi with Cinzia Delorenzi & Filippo M. Ceredi, Trame ecologiche: Experiential translation as practice of ecological weaving, in the Performative & Experiential Translation: Meaning making through Language, Art, and Media, King's College London, 13-15 July 2022 https://experientialtranslation.net/research/conference/.
  • Workshop: Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi, Art and space – collaborative work (in progress), Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway, 7th December 2022
  • Workshop: Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi, Ospitare / Hosting others. Experiential translation as practice of ecological weaving, at the Center for Global Studies, University of Victoria, Canada, Friday, November 18th 2022 https://www.uvic.ca/research/centres/globalstudies/ 

In 2023 we held the online workshop: “Experiential translation and creative life writing” for the CANI-NET Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network, 2023 March 6thhttps://cani-net.com

In 2023 and 2024 we held experiential translation workshops in Milan with students of Arabic, Chinese and Japanese in the BA course in Intercultural Communication, University of Milano Bicocca.

 Art and Space workshop bergen 2022 2

Photo: Gaia Del Negro, Art and space – collaborative work (in progress), Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway, 7th December 2022

 Art and Space workshop bergen 2022 3

Photo: Gaia Del Negro, Art and space – collaborative work (in progress), Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway, 7th December 2022