creative practice PAST PROJECTS STORIES FROM THE WORLD I firmly believe in the power of both visualising and reimagining our pain as a way to come to terms with it. I also believe that the way we imagine things defines how we relate to them, and therefore that reimagining social causes through creativity can lead people to rethink of them, better understand them, and better relate to them. In the project Stories From the World I united these two concepts. I collaborated with people from around the world to tell and leave a trace of their stories of hardship and pain, and I subsequently reimagined them into video performances. I then used social media platforms to share these video productions and to inform, educate, and engage people in the social matters emerging from the participants’ stories. During the various phases of the project, I aimed at creating a safe venue of expression for the participants where to share their experience. The project strived not to box stories into defined ‘topics’ but it instead honoured intersectionality in the belief that any experience is composed of multiple and co-dependent factors and this is why every story is unique. The artistic process was an ongoing act of translation: as experience and memory were translated into storytelling, these stories were then translated into video performances. Even in the final creations, interdisciplinarity and intermediality were at play as, in a sense, the story travels across the various languages of the performance: the different semantic layers of word, image, performance, and symbolism all 'translate' (and thus reinterpret) the meaning of the story in their own unique way, each of them adding new layers of significance, while nevertheless remaining in constant dialogue with one other and therefore creating a sort of synasethetic experience. In this way, the process of reimagining and 'translating' these experiences of hardship into creativity allowed both the participants to reimagine their pain through an artistic – and hopefully cathartic – process, and viewers to engage with social justice topics through a different, personal, closer perspective. Everyone has a voice, I just make it visible. Episode 1 • “Revealing the pattern” The story following the steps of the anonymous participant’s post-gradaution mental health struggles leading into anxiety and panic disorders, the diagnosis, the discovery of having suffered from OCD for 5 years, and finally the start of the process of recovery. The Performance This video performance is based on the concept of hands trying to arrange stones in a pattern representing recurring patterns of thought and behaviour and the underlying symptoms of OCD. The turmoil of academic life, constantly distracting and hindering the signals of this mental disorder, is represented by a bucket disrupting the pattern with new stones. A sudden change leads to a painful awareness and realisation. Through the process of diagnosis, the camera pans out and is able to show the complete pattern and its elements. In the end, hands hesitantly disarranging a few rocks, represent the beginning of the recovering process. Episode 2: “A solitary experience” The story recounting Brinda’s family dynamics in India, the early toll inflicted by artificial beauty standards imposed by family and media since a young age, the hard path from anorexia to bulimia to a suicide attempt, and the following, tortuous process of recovery. The Performance Hands frantically shaping a clay statuette trying to slim it, binge-feeding it, and then tearing at it again. A clay figure in the background represents the model perpetuated by family, society and media of what a woman’s body should look like and which the participant has internalised. After trying to destroy the statuette with a bucket of water, a hard process of recovery begins. The participant’s voice eventually narrates how she realised that the process of recovery has to start from within, while the hands turn and hide the clay model. Episode 3: “New routes, new roots” The story of Yazdan, starting with the physical and emotional violence his family was subjected to in Iran: from his father’s attempts to forcefully arrange the marriages of Yazdan’s two little twins sisters to the violence and death threats Yazdan’s mother received for not agreeing to them. Yazdan’s words trace his mother and twin sisters story of hopelessness and final escape until their arrival in Croatia, where they finally obtained asylum and were able to start a new life. The Performance This video performance portrays the conflict between Yazdan’s father and the mother attempting to tenaciously fight for her children’s childhood, as a struggle between someone trying to paint a blossoming branch and a hand violently erasing it with black paint. The actions repeat following the moving story related by the participant. After the climax in Yazdan’s story where he finds out that his mother is in real danger, the screen goes black, and when the canvas re-appears there is a hole in it, the painting has been cut away. The camera transitions to another setting in which the torn painting has been sewed on an other canvas. This represents their final escape from the threat, and the new place in which they receive asylum: Croatia. Although you can still see the black paint underneath (the past will always be part of their story), now the buds finally can grow into beautiful fowers, away from violence and threats.