our vision.

The goals of the Network are to develop research surrounding the experience of suffering and healing, to envision and understand relationships of healing through the arts, and to organise effective means of distributing resource to under-serviced populations.

This means output in:

academic research

artistic innovation

& distribution of community resources.

The method is threefold: First, the Network seeks to promote an encouraging community of collaboration for narrative and performance artists. Second, the focus on artistic practice guides academic reflection and research on suffering and healing. Third, the Network encourages the dissemination of community resources, particularly prioritizing underserviced populations. In this way, the embodied exploration of the imagination is used as a tool for communal healing.

In his famous book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van Der Kolk writes that: ‘The overwhelming experience [of trauma] is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts and physical sensations related to trauma take on a life of their own’ (van der Kolk 2015: 66). This connects to Emmanuel Levinas’ idea that the pain of suffering, or undergoing, is ‘intrinsically…useless, for nothing…basic senselessness’ (Levinas 1988: 157-158). It is an experience of overwhelm; it is passively received, and breaks down our common ways of relating to the world.

But Levinas goes further. He says that when another person can help someone exit their suffering, then meaning is brought to experience - the other person helps the sufferer to heal. This is not just a mental phenomena; rather, it is a bodied experience. We are ‘conscious of the world through the medium of the body’, Merleau-Ponty tells us (2002: 221).

Just as healing trauma is a bodied activity, so also experiences of care require reimagining the possibilities of relational experience. It requires the imagination. It extends relationally as community. It brings meaning into experiences of loneliness, pain and overwhelm, and opens us up to the world, and to ourselves again. For Ricoeur, the bringing the body home to itself is the ultimate form of belonging: ‘One’s own body,’ Ricœur says, ’is the very place — in the strong sense of the term — of…belonging, thanks to which the self can place its mark on those events that are its actions’ (1992: 319). In bringing the body back to a state of belonging, movement becomes a means of restoring hope.

These are some of the core thoughts surrounding the work that the Network is engaged with. It seeks to engage voices of practitioners, academics and artists to develop new and innovate collaborations that can bring experiences of healing to a wider group of people. The Network is particularly interested in bringing resources to communities with limited accessibility, including migrant and remote communities, through online platforms.