STORY TELLING
We can imagine and create ourselves and our kinships through narrating stories. Telling new stories and re-narrating old ones takes us beyond what we already know about the world. Balancing our stories between fictive and lived experience, we can widen our view of what and who constitutes our kin. We can enact storytelling through:
- ➔ building constellation of our kin elements
- ➔ refiguring the stories that we have lost
- ➔ thinking about our extended more-than-human families
- ➔ expanding and re-inventing ourselves and our connective possibilities in the human and
VISUALIZING AND MATERIALIZING
We can use different forms of material expression to explore and visualize anew how we connect with each other and with the world. Such expressions can take form of:
- ➔ collective clay sculptures
- ➔ re-creations of family fridgedrawings
- ➔ inventive mappings of ourcircles of support
- ➔ drawings of ourselves asfictional characters (such as seaslugs)
- ➔ diaries of diasporic kinshipdrawings
- ➔ visual lists ourmore-than-human kin relations (with dogs, mountains, insects, trees, etc.)
RE-WORDING
To deconstruct what we know about families, we have to re-invent a new vocabulary. How can we call new kinship roles that do not yet exist ? For each new kisnhsiprole, we need to define:
- ➔ an etymology
- ➔ social characteristics
- ➔ the needs that it responds to
- ➔ how it connects to otherkinship roles
To truly liberate ourselves from oppressive family formats, we have to be careful not to reproduce established systems of power as we engag
ELECTRO MAGNETIC FIELD (EMF) DISCHARGING MATS
These devices enable the de-charging of bodies and body-systems from excess electrical charge (accumulated due to over exposure to EMFs), as a stand point to create fields of potentials where affiliations with the human and more-than-human kin can occur.
BREAKING DOWN EVERYDAY RITUALS
Kinship is something we do, not something we are. To imagine new kinship possibilities we must break down our everyday family rituals to see them for what they are – quotidian practices made from things we say, gestures we perform and objects we carry and use. By mixing and playing around with these elements, we can begin to de-familiarize with what we have learned to perceive as “normal” and reimagine new ways to make “weird” affinities.
In a group of people, ask everyone to note on color-categorized papers:
- ➔ a phrase a relative of theirs usuallysays
- ➔ an action or gesture another relativeusually performs
- ➔ a piece of clothing or object a thirdrelative usually uses or carries around Fold and mix the pieces of paper and invite everyone to randomly pick up one from each category. Use these as instructions to perform new uncommon family roles among your group.
REIMAGINING THE LAW
We need to revisit the law of kinship to allow alternative kin families to be recognized, enjoy equal rights and be protected in our societies. After reading current international, transnational and national human rights law, note down what is missing and what is problematic in them. Can your notes be reordered to form new legal articles? Have a go.
WALKING AND TALKING
Walking in pairs allows us to create a space for intimate conversations. Walking sets a tempo in our bodies, for sharing kinship narrations. Walks and talks can be orchestrated under a score of questions such as:
- ➔ how do you connect tokinship?
- ➔ can you remember the lasttime you felt a sense of kinship with someone who is not part of your “immediate” family?
- ➔ what does love in a kin families means to you?
GRIEVING CIRCLE
Any process of transformation embodies grief in it. Embracing the loss of a desire makes space for new realities. We can grief what we have lost, that which has never been given to us, or a longing for something we might never experience. To be able to imagine and navigate new kinship and family models, it is helpful to generate a space within and around us where we care for our emotional discomforts.This is an invitation to create your own ceremony, using the transformative power of water and the voice as a healing tool:
- ➔ be surrounded and witnessed by your choice of kin while shedding your tears
- ➔ give everyone a bowl of water to talk to as you would talk to your dearest friend, the one that listens best
- ➔ pour the water in a collective vessel placed in the middle of the circle, when filled with grief, weep to it as if you would weep if you would never have told to be quiet (don’t hold back) and then sing to it as if you would sing a newborn baby to sleep
- ➔ empty the vessel in a location where water flows naturally
SOMATIC EXPLORATION OF CARE RELATIONS
Play is a form of care for the world and for each other. We share this play in the form a simple score we can either play together, you and us, or that we can guide you through, one or more couples at a time. Perhaps you’ve already done this in other contexts. It’s pretty straightforward, but offers a lot of stuff for thought regarding the roles in a caregiving relation whether mutually between humans, or between humans and more than humans. Our invitation is to study-play together. Today we are students of Body-Mind Centering (BMC), what do you play-study? BMC is an somatic approach to learning, living and knowledge making. Developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in exchange with many practitioners of a wide variety of somatic quests, including Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, several East- and South-East Asian body-mind traditions, such as Yoga and Qui Gong, it has occasioned relations between those somatic practices that could be seen as relations between kin in a loving spirit. BMC is taught as a tool for facilitating and learning to live together with difference, based on what each of us can discover through and in the body and the mind, as creatures always in movement and endlessly developing.
FAKE THERAPY
Developed by Valentina Desideri
This is a practice between two people that stimulates and reactivates the sometimes hidden capacities of anyone to heal someone (or something) else. It is an autonomous practice of disciplinary origin and rejects expertise or any mode of knowing-authority. Perceiving care as central in the formation of kinships, we invite you to employ this method to examine new balances of care-giving and care-receiving.
CIRCLES OF SUPPORT
Developed by Judith Snow & Marsha Forest
A circle of support is a way of connecting a person with a disability to their community. A group of people, who are known to the person with a disability, is established to support the person to identify things they would like to achieve or alter in their life.