World Community Connect was founded by Masa Hilcisin, educator, visual artist, and somatic movement
therapist in training with the intention of creating a space, sanctuary and community where plurality is a
norm (read more about her in-depth story here).
This is a space where tolerance, diversity and equality are nurtured, promoted, and respected where creating, and sharing stories, cultivating self-expression, healing, and education are accessible to all people regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, or age.
Here we foster sharing, expression, and healing through diverse creative workshops, creative social projects, education programs, meditation practices, intuitive energetic healing, and other integrative practices.
Our complex cultures, unresolved histories, social conditioning, inherited individual and collective narratives, all kinds of -isms and -phobias, and internal limitations created a space where we more and more isolate, censor our voices, and experience fear from making brave choices and courageous promises that will serve our individual and collective well being.
Here in this community, we encourage deep creative exploration of selves whether it is through whispering, screaming out loud, moving the body, painting, dancing, experimenting, movie making, performing, creative writing, healing, breathing, storytelling, singing, engaging with social art, exploring art as social tool, collaging, playing, conceptualizing, intuitive mark marking, abstracting, installing objects together, dismantling objects...
We encourage to express what is not allowed to express, to feel what is suppressed or restricted, to meet our deepest self, to face our core wounds, to dig in the dirt, to face our inner darkness, to embrace disowned parts.
World Community Connect wants to keep offering re-education of all of these aspects that have been conditioned, repressed and neglected.
Our core values are compassion, equality, creativity, courage, love, diversity, responsibility, and community.
Hi, I am Masa. I started the organization World Community Connect because my dream was to create space where creative processes, healing, and education will be accessible to everyone, and where tolerance, diversity, and equality will be nurtured and respected.
I am visual artist, educator, holistic human development practitioner, and somatic movement therapist in training.
My personal experiences of growing up in a war zone, witnessing destructive nationalism, religious and ethnic segregation, gender-based violence, experiencing different forms of abuse, deaths of loved ones, migration, losing my family, going through journey of single motherhood, dismantling the old and building the new, helped me to learn on how to alchemize those experiences into tools for personal growth, and being of service to others.
I began to explore creative tools, film-making, collages, paintings, visual experimentation, and other forms of visual storytelling to tell and share some of the deepest and the most intimate personal experiences, along with meditation, mindfulness, somatic movement, conscious body, energy healing, the mind - body connection, ethics, safety, socially engaging narratives...I began to explore all of these as a portal to allow myself to face some of the deepest wounds, to allow myself to grieve, to give my self permission to heal, to expand my inner and outer worlds, to embrace self sovereignty, to expand my spirituality, to make courageous promises to myself, and to make life changing choices.
These experiences also taught me about the importance of tolerance, respect, diversity, and openness and made me gravitate towards people and communities of all backgrounds.
I wanted to cultivate the idea that creating and sharing personal fragments, unraveling stories of our lives, our struggles, and achievements not only create powerful pool that we can reach out to when we need to feel sense of community or support or to find those who walk similar path as we do but it also opens the path to some of the deepest and core healing.
I grew up in Bosnia. I used to walk or ride a bicycle around 10 kilometers every day to get to the high school, and then come back home crossing another 10 kilometers through some of the most dangerous parts of the city, which were exposed to sniper shootings and grenades.
Around the age of 18 I was selected as one of the protagonists for the documentary film ‘Ragazzi di Sarajevo’ (Children of Sarajevo) directed by Italian documentary filmmaker, Daniela Cavini.
In ‘Children of Sarajevo’ I shared some of the most painful experiences about war time, and I also learned about the importance of having one’s voice heard and sharing that voice with the rest of the world.
Nevertheless it took me years after that to find the form which would be a transcendent channel for my voice.
It was not only about finding the form. It was also about finding the courage to share and ‘occupy’ public space, to expose sensitivities, fears, traumas, experiences, all of them through conscious statements about society, community, norms, values.
It did not happen until I got involved into feminist activism through street actions, feminist art festivals and a number of various human rights campaigns. Articulation of continuous violence and discrimination against women in post-war Balkan’s society further shaped my visions and views.
After co-directing and co-producing my very first documentary film, which depicted lives of women in a village, exploring the engaging art and articulating social and human rights issues through documentary perspective, became one of my main forms of personal expression.
I struggled with sharing my own stories for a long time. I used to filter those stories and mask them with persona suitable for not to be “too much” of anything. Even thought, some of the most challenging years of my life I overcame by expressing myself creatively. Yet it took me many years to give myself permission to create and share my stories.
Until I learned that creating goes so much further and beyond any formal education institution. Until I realized that one of the ways we make impact and contribute to our own healing processes, and healing processes of others is by sharing our stories.
Until I learned it is our birthright to create. Until I learned that our individual and collective creating, the power of self-expression has enormous effect in cultivating empathy and compassion, and building healthier world.
Experiencing the migration, being alone and building my own space in a new country, being in survival mode many times and then losing my beloved mother, strengthened my passion and importance of not giving up one’s creative force and finding myself a place in the world as a woman, artist, humanist, activist, educator, mother.
Throughout the years of my doctoral studies in film and audio-visual field, I discovered other aspects of visual aesthetics which inspired not only my teaching engagement but also influenced my body of work which diverted towards reflection, exploring my own past, relationships, and diving deeper into the space within.
My creative and healing work changed the trajectory when I understood magical mixtures of elements of art, nature, inner journeys, and outer worlds. Constantly exploring visual, body work, paints, video, fabrics, experimental open spaces, and hand works, my artwork began to take shape. I had the great fortune of studying work of people from different parts of the world, visual art made by dozens of women for the past two centuries, a key forces that helped my work to become sublimation of visual personal open space, space that invites people all over the world to share their voices, sing their songs, dance their stories, write their memories.
I seek for many answers, and after making enough physical distance from physical space which was and still is so traumatized by war, I finally started with establishing a dialogue with an internalized past and the outside world through a visual plane.
The result of that was that I began working on a series of visual narratives constructed through personal images. For the past several years, I have been continuously creating and sharing personal narratives.
I still see a teenage girl who rides a bicycle on her way to the school, escaping snipers and mortar shells in order to escape into a different world at least for a moment, to escape into something creative and profound. Yes. Sharing the voice and darkest places of our soul can be overwhelming, and can be scary and frightening. It can make us vulnerable and exposed, but it also deepens our own individuation, awakening a continuous awareness of caring and nurturing stories and experiences that need to be told.
I want to keep integrating creative processes, creative tools of telling and sharing our personal narratives via various forms of visual storytelling, socially engaged art using practical experiential learning along with somatic movement, energies, and holistic approach to ourselves.
I want to be of service to others as facilitator of creative and healing processes, to encourage creating and sharing personal narratives, to dismantle stereotypes, social conditioning, guilt, fear, shame, and many other patterns which are detrimental to individual and collective well-being.
If you feel drawn to explore any of these creative and healing tools, if you would like to co-create with me, if you would like to share your tales, I will be happy to meet you in our Creative Lab.
When we are authentic ourselves, and when we follow powerful self-expression that is unique to us we create environment that is in alignment with our needs and wants, we dare to make life changing decisions, we dare to make courageous choices in every areas of our lives, we built communities, we become of service to those who walk the same or similar path as we do, we deepen our connections, we foster a sense of empathy and compassion, we give ourselves permission to take core healing journey, we choose what to do and what not to do any more, we create healthy boundaries, we dare to stand up for ourselves and our loved ones, we dare to challenges our internal systems and beliefs, we dare to dismantle stereotypes, prejudices, and old paradigms, we dare to dive deep, we dare to dig dirt, we dare to face our shame and to dismantle it, we dare to dance with our fear, we dare to respond with our anger, we dare to step into the wild and unknown, we dare to find our fire, we dare to discover our aggression and marry it with wisdom, we dare to be in service of our own growth, we dare to bring forth stories we were not allowed to tell, we dare to ask questions, we dare to assert our needs, we dare to love...
