Creative Online Lab for Visual Storytelling, Somatic Movement, and Socially Engaged Art:
Transforming personal narratives into growth and resilience through powerful creative self-expression
Is this for you?
If some of these resonate with you, than this program may be for you:
I find it challenging to express myself whether it is creatively or through other means
I struggle to untangle myself from social conditioning, and expectations
I am war survivor
I experienced migration
I struggle with sense of belonging
I feel I belong nowhere
I experience shame and guilt
I don't trust myself and my inner knowing
I feel rage towards personal and collective injustices, and I don't know how to express them
I don't have time for self-care, self-development, and self-work
I don't know which tools to use to take care of myself
I am scared of making big decisions
I feel uncomfortable to assert my needs
My story doesn't matter
I don't feel heard or seen
I punish myself
I self - reject
I self - silence
To grow through uncomfortable changes
Telling a story about ourselves may be one of the most intimate and personal things we can do. Through storytelling, we can come to know who we are in unforeseen ways. We can also create common ground for sharing stories that need to be told. This kind of storytelling needs to be grounded in feelings and experiences. We share our work so we do not foreclose our need to tell our story. We can also start a process of healing, or heal a wound which was buried deep inside us long ago.
Through the medium of visual re-framing, we can begin to understand that images we hold of ourselves are often the embodiment of particular complex personal experiences, fears, losses, and/or unfulfilled hopes and desires, and to reclaim the energy that has been locked up in them in order to use it in more conscious and constructive ways.
During Creative Lab, participants are encouraged to show important tiny details of personal events in the context of unblocking perceptions, exploring old symbols, collating to make visible and sharing private inner selves, as well as to express forbidden subjects, explore visual grammar, abstract language, and many aspects of selves - as “there is no single self but many fragmented selves", explore tools that support participants in expressing in a universal language their desires, dreams, lives, stories while translating their personal experiences into visual form.
We all have sets of personalized archetypal images in our subconscious. We can reclaim, reconstruct, reintegrate and reinvent them so that they can work in our interest instead of against it.
Participants will engage with their personal experience to the degree to which it feels comfortable. Facilitators will hold space for participants during the process. We will hold space for each other.
It is important to show respect for participants’ confidentiality, respect for yourself, and respect for the personal and space of other participants.
What kind of creative process is this?
Creative process can profoundly shift boundaries between rational and irrational mind, it allows exploration of personal aesthetic and personal narratives without being set in rules and parameters related to conventional norms and paradigms . It strives to use its full potential while often merging other art forms (painting, dance, movement, photography, collage, and many others). All of these open infinite space for self-exploration, creative freedom, playing with what is “unacceptable”, or “illogical” , or “un-understandable”, or “unclear” and focusing solely on inner journey, and deeply authentic expression of self. In addition to all of these, this is a type of creative process allows spontaneity, and space where creatively everything is allowed.
Once we identify emotion and in which part of the body we feel that particular emotion, it becomes more tangible. Therefore, we can create more space for dialogue with that emotion, accepting, and releasing what needs to be released.
Here, we want to explore our own experiences, become an active subject, and deconstruct ourselves visually in an attempt to identify the processes by which we had been previously ‘put together’: presenting – or re-presenting - the previously unrepresentable, explore personal and social injustices, express them visually and somatically through body, and support deep and core healing.
Topics covered during the program
Personal storytelling: Writing (poem/fragments/diary/letter/novel/story) / Leading others, and Being guided by others, building of trust / Somatic practice: Embody Your-self / Socially engaged art / Meditation / Stream of consciousness in writing / Self-expression and Creative Growth / Experimentation with creative tools / Safe space and consent / Social engagement and injustice / Personal narrative / Social impact / Empowerment and self-love / Taking ownership of our bodies / Energy healing / Shame, guilt, and forgiveness / Setting regular self-care and managing schedule / Production work
What you will receive from this experience?
- Get familiar with variety of creative and healing tools that you can keep using in daily life (with ease and not so much time) or whenever you need them for self-development, to release inner tension, to reduce stress, and to further support your own healing journey
- Explore and experiment with creative processes whether it is through visual art or body
- Explore variety of somatic techniques
- Explore variety of video/collage/painting and other creative techniques
- Have an opportunity to connect with fellow humans who walk the same or similar paths
- Explore practices and tools you can use to courageously express your needs
- Have a space to talk, share, and create
- Have an opportunity to further support strengthening of connections and communities, and participate with your art works in establishing a common platform where stories will be shared
- Address taboos
- Create art works that reflects personal narratives
- Create art works that addresses your dialogue with society
- Dismantle stereotypes, prejudices, and old paradigms
- Dive deep
- Address shame and to dismantle it
- Have an opportunity to give your self permission to respond with anger
- Have an opportunity to dare to be in service of your own growth
- Have an opportunity to bring forth stories you were not allowed to tell
- Ask questions
- Embrace disowned parts
Methods of work
Online sessions once per week combined with activities that participants will be asked to complete between sessions. Participants will be also supported by Online group, external materials and resources, practical exercises, and community.
Participants may prepare: journals/notebooks and pens, and photographs or other particular objects they have access to in their immediate environment
Duration: 4 weeks
Audience: Above 18, open for all, people from diverse backgrounds, adolescents, social leaders, activists, NGO professionals, LGBTQ+, migrants, immigrants, refugees, mothers, single parents, artists, those who want to create something for the very first time, those who want to create, tell and share their stories, those who want to express what is not allowed to express, to feel what is suppressed or restricted, to meet their selves, to dig in the dirt, those who want to dismantle the old and conceive the new...
If you are interested in Creative Online Lab, you can contact us here:
Thank you!