CORE TEAM
We have started In Touch Amsterdam to devote more time and active work (beyond the individual effort) on the topics of migration and integration.
Dora Djamila Mester
As a personal coach / counselor I help my clients to heal issues in their sexual life or relationships. As a trainer I do in-service training, personal coaching and group sessions for teachers, trainers and professionals from various fields.
As a migrant woman myself, I also work on migration and life transitions with my clients.
My work with people taught me that physical space has a crucial role in creating security and intimacy for the emotional work to be done. I have a long-term project plan about creating a green place, a Garden, a ´European garden´. This garden would not belong to a particular country but would be interconnected; floating above cultures but also embedded into the culture of its physical location. This would be a safe place for integration, arrival.
In Touch Amsterdam is supposed to be one further step towards the idea of the ´European Floating Garden´ could come true.
Balazs bodo
Hello, my name is Balazs. I’m a social scientist by training, a humanist by happenstance, a migrant by choice.
I consider myself a child of the Enlightenment. I believe that shared intimacy is the most powerful source of good on Earth. I make jewelry from the detritus of life, and I like getting lost in unknown places. InTouch is the latest of such places.
Vaida Siksnyte
I am passionate and experienced about equality, diversity, and inclusion! Bringing together substantial academic and professional expertise in Gender and LGBTQ+ equality, together with intimacy and sexuality education – my work is focused on creating dialogue between gender, sexuality and cultural differences in order to deal with discriminatory concepts against intersectional identities.
My goal is to achieve change within social, cultural and political discourses through construction and translation of intimate relations into our everyday lives.
PARTNERS
Katharina Conradi
I am educated as a Dancer/ Choreographer, Certified Movement Analyst , Master Dance Therapy and Registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist. I have been working as a choreographer and dancer in the Netherlands and abroad for thirty years. My creative work includes dance movies, intercultural projects and site-specific performances. I am teaching dance at the University of the Arts Codarts in Rotterdam and at the Academy for Dance and Theatre in Amsterdam to physical actors, dancers, circus artists and dance therapists. I work internationally as a teacher for somatic and creative practice in different settings in Spain, Estonia, Israel, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and New York. I am offering individual dance therapy, effective movement coaching and somatic practice in my Studio in Amsterdam. Together with Marieke Delannoy I co-founded EMOVE Institute, an educational institute for Laban Bartenieff Movement Systems in the Netherlands
PARTNER ORGANISATIONS
ELAN INTERCULTUREL (PAris)
Let’s experience diversity! Elan Interculturel is an association created in 2008 under the 1901 law with a motto: to experience diversity. To take an intercultural impulse – “élan” in French – is to allow oneself to see the differences, without fixating them. It’s about being able to enjoy them, without forcing them. It is about taking the time to train oneself to manage uncertainty, otherness and change. It means taking responsibility by making visible and fighting against inequalities linked to differences in our society. The artistic mediation centre invites us to explore the intersec- tions between art and diversity: how art illustrates both what unites and differentiates people from different cultures, but also how engagement in artistic creativity stimulates our ability to meet the stranger within or outside ourselves.
Associació La Xixa Teatre (Barcelona)
La Xixa is a non-profit association specialised in the research, development and multiplication of theatrical tools and popular education as a means of social transformation. We are a multi-disciplinary and multicultural group of collab- orators, with the support of more than 30 volunteers trained in the field of social sciences, pedagogy and arts. The diversity within our team enriches our social and creative work, and that keeps us in permanent training and learning.
We conduct workshops for various groups, training for trainers and artistic actions at a local and international level around three main axes:
interculturality, racism, xenophobia, and social inclusion;
gender, equality and sexual diversity;
active citizenship, citizen participation and local development.
La Xixa is dedicated to facilitating the creation of spaces of empowerment through Participatory Methodologies, Pro- cess-Oriented Psychology and Theatre of the Oppressed, and to generate processes of individual and collective trans- formation in contexts of social vulnerability.
Cessie (PAlermo)
CESIE is a European Centre of Studies and Initiatives based in Palermo, Sicily. It was established in 2001, inspired by the work and theories of the sociologist, activist and educator Danilo Dolci (1924-1997). Our mission is to promote educational innovation, participation and growth. CESIE’s slogan, the world is only one creature, express the philosophy for which the organisation works: inclusion and equity for all. CESIE is structured in 6 main units: Higher Education and Research: fostering progress, sustainable and responsible research and innovation in Higher Education and Research Systems; Rights and Justice: promoting equality, protecting the rights of people, preventing and developing responses to violence and discrimination; Adult: upgrading lifelong learning in adult education, boosting innovative practices and developing key competences for adults; Migration: developing effective and inclusive approaches for asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants; School: improving quality and efficiency in school education; Youth: enhancing active citizenship, training, education, and mobility of young people.
Towards Nature permaculture landscaping
Permaculture Design, Consultancy and Landscaping company based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Our passion is creating naturally balanced environments and sustainable lifestyle, with using Permaculture understanding and techniques. We believe that Humanity should find their correct place within our planet’s natural systems, without disturbing those systems and depleting natural resources. More importantly, Humanity should play a crucial role on restoring the damage created within the last hundred years. This is possible with combining regenerative land design, sustainable community building and using innovative technologies for creating a different pathway for humanity to follow on Earth.
Gemeente Amsterdam (Stadsdeel Oost)
