This story doesn't begin in Paris.
It begins with a group of people who had already found each other — educators, artists, researchers, practitioners — who had already spent enough time together to know that something was possible between them. When they gathered in Paris in January 2025, they weren't introducing themselves. They were returning to a question they hadn't finished asking.
The question was: what does it mean to craft pedagogies of togetherness? Not as a framework to be delivered, but as something to be lived — designed from the inside of an experience, not above it.
Paris: Crafting and Prototyping
The residency happened in two phases, six months apart. 43 educators, artists, activists, researchers, and facilitators from across Europe and beyond came together — not to receive a curriculum, but to co-create one.
The first phase, in January, was about entering — learning to be present with one another, attuning to what was actually in the room. The second, in April, was about prototyping — taking what had been sensed and trying to give it form.
The methodology combined social arts, embodied awareness, and Awareness-Based Design: ways of working that treat the body as a source of knowledge, not just a vehicle for carrying ideas from one place to another. Social Presencing Theater. Collective movement. Non-verbal sense-making. The aesthetics of being together as a field of inquiry in itself.
What emerged were prototypes — not finished tools but experiments. Practices designed to be carried back into schools, organizations, and communities, and tested there. The application was never going to happen inside the residency. The residency was the preparation for it.
Helsinki: Sensing What Comes Next
By November, the group had grown. 35 people from twelve countries gathered at Aalto University for five days — not to start again, but to deepen and document what had been developing.
One part of the group worked to record short pedagogical films of embodied togetherness practices — a delicate task, since much of what makes these practices alive resists being captured. The other part continued to explore the curriculum's dimensions: its why, its how, its what.
Four learning pillars had emerged through the process: embodied presence, relational awareness, collective creativity, and the capacity to describe experience — to find words, or art forms, for what has been felt but not yet spoken.
On the final days, the two groups reunited to ask together: what is ours to do next?
What the Process Asked of People
These residencies were not comfortable in the way that well-organized events are comfortable. They asked something harder: to suspend judgment — of the process, of each other, of what was emerging. To stay in the question when it would have been easier to reach for an answer.
The moments that mattered most tended to arrive when people stopped performing — stopped doing the residency and started actually being in it. There was joy in that. Not the smooth joy of things going well, but the more surprising joy of genuine encounter.
One participant described the work as "treading in fresh snow — revisiting over and over a space of presence, not manipulative, not instrumental, just an experience to open again and again to the social field."
That phrase has stayed.
A Recurring Question
Lab. Atelier. Residency. Togetherness. Presence. These words return in this work across years, groups, and geographies.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez traces a family that repeats the same names across seven generations — José Arcadio, Aureliano — and with the names come the same patterns, the same fates. The repetition is both continuity and curse. Each generation believes it is living something new while the same structure turns beneath.
The question this work keeps asking is similar: when we return to the same words, are we repeating or renewing? Is "togetherness" the same word after it has been lived through 43 bodies in Paris, through 35 in Helsinki, through years of practice that preceded both? Or does each encounter fill the vessel with something that wasn't there before?
The risk is mistaking the word for the experience. The possibility is that the word is never finished — that it keeps opening, as long as people are willing to enter it honestly.
What are the conditions that make this possible? Trust. Safety. Friendship. Time. The willingness to not know together.
The widening, the loss of control, the unfolding — these are not failures of method. They are what the method is for.
What Came Next
Three collaborative academic articles are currently being co-authored by groups of participants — on Awareness-Based Collective Creativity, Socially-Engaged Arts-Based Research Methods, and the integration of Artificial Intelligence and Social Arts methodology.
The pedagogical films from Helsinki will be made available on an open learning platform for students, educators, and systems change facilitators.
The work continues.
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*This story emerged from two residencies: the Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness Residency in Paris, an Erasmus+ co-funded project led by Studio Atelierista with AMLE (France) as host organization; and the Being Together Residency at Aalto University, Helsinki, organized by Studio Atelierista, the Presencing Institute, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, and Radical Creativity.
Studio Atelierista is a co-founding partner of WellSpaces Network.
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