Messwork's Embodied Making Somatic Design Workshop

Embodied Making is a 2.5 hour workshop offering a distinct fusion of the intuitive art of collage-making and somatic practices designed to cultivate creativity and self-awareness (of our whole and parts) through the body's wisdom. Somatics, an alternative to traditional therapy, emphasizes bottom-up, body-oriented approaches to treat trauma and modify stress responses while supporting alignment, integration, fullness, and consciousness-raising.

Participants will explore carefully curated techniques, including mindful breathing, body scans, resourcing, and visualization exercises, enabling a deeper connection with one's environment, the tools at hand, and the artistic collages created. Whether you're an experienced artist or designer or simply curious about the transformative potential of somatic practices and creativity, Embodied Making offers a holistic approach to self-expression and healing in a supportive and enriching environment.

This workshop is led by Messwork, a somatic practice creating process-oriented interventions for clients. Designed and run by Cristina (Cri) Gabriele, Messwork emphasizes healing as a process while reclaiming and utilizing its inherent messiness as a tool. Aligning with somatic practices as a transforming through process, Messwork collaborates with clients as living, breathing compositions, seeking to create, form, reform, and rearrange selves and parts into unified wholes, naturally rehabilitating the state of consciousness.

More about Messwork:

Trauma often fractures parts, leading to splits, binds, and disjointedness. Through the co-creative Messwork process, clients can reconstitute themselves by meeting their trauma and bringing awareness to patterns, defenses, and relational dynamics. Reshaping (messily), as an ongoing practice, helps clear blocks, awareness, and the capacity to contain and feel while supporting a more grounded, robust, and energized existence.

Grounded in Core Energetics, Messwork integrates diverse perspectives throughout the modality, including Bioenergetic Analysis and Parts Work (comprised of inquiring into discreet sub-personalities), systems thinking, role-playing, and externalizing in service of the organized, integrated whole, focusing on Psychosomatic Unity, the movement toward creative evolution, and rehabilitation from within.

Messwork views each individual as a holistic entity. As such, they believe self-care is an ecosystem of complementary mechanisms. Messwork is its own psychosomatic practice that recognises and works in conjunction with pathological and more traditional therapeutic modalities.

More about the practitioner Cristina (Cri) Gabriele:

Cri (pronounced Cree) Gabriele deconstructs and reshapes as part of her creative process, seeking to arrive at synthesis while making (and embracing) a lot of mess. Messwork facilitates a multidisciplinary yet holistic approach to trauma recovery and abundant living. With her Bachelor of Psychology and Business from Northeastern University, a Master of Fine Arts in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, and her ongoing education as a practitioner in training, Cri integrates complex skill sets into a robust, full-bodied foundation upon which to reinforce her work and practice.

As a creator, practitioner, and educator, Cri's psychological and design expertise fuels her methodological and theoretical frameworks and approaches, exploring the inherent nature and connection across somatics, psychology, design, and mess. Currently teaching Graduate Communications Design at Pratt Institute, Cri expands her namesake practice, Cg Studio, into Messwork and Messwork Practice Building, offerings employing and leveraging somatics, design, and the transformative power of mess as a catalyst for personal and business growth.

In her own Messwork, Cri navigated various academic and personal therapeutic territories before finding somatics. A health crisis in her late twenties catapulted her inquiry into more comprehensive healing modalities, punctuating the significance and impact of being treated as a whole rather than a series of fragments. As a result of her own experience, Cri recognises the acute urgency and need to create more vigorous, holistic practices toward growth and rehabilitation, an offering she now extends to her clients, meeting them in their fullness, complexity, and humanity.

More about Head Hi:

Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art, design and cultural programming located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.