Hosting others. Looking for traces of transformation in adult education through somatic and artistic relational work

We are two researchers, an artist and a social worker. The paper presents two stories from our current project of an international research on experiential translation. Our local contribution in the project consists of two workshops of multimodal translation (Campbell & Vidal, 2019) of a performance and two poetic texts in a public park, and a final piece of art for a collective public exhibition with all other local teams of researchers and artists. The reflections and creative response produced by two participants, a man and a woman, a writer/editor and an architect/performer, particularly struck us. He is not used to somatic practice in groups, and she seems less used to using words in writing and more used to creating things with others in a relationship. In response to our invitation they produced autobiographical texts, photos of an installation in a natural setting, and an audio of an informal conversation with one of us. We found traces in their material of transformation (Mezirow, 1991) in the use of creative languages as a possibility to encounter the others deeply with words, body, gesture, position and movement in space. We will present the results of a creative compositional analysis (Formenti, 2018) conducted by meeting in a group and going through moments of individual reflexivity and auto/biographical writing as inquiry (Richardson, 1997) to produce connected knowledge about transformation in adult education. The game we want to play is one of mirrors, after a long period of social isolation to give us a space to reflect on the desire for a collective human flourishing. Others live in us (Candiani, 2021) and let us see from other perspectives (Formenti & West, 2018).