After five years of moving from Budapest to Amsterdam both as a professional and as an ordinary woman I got a better understanding of the term´migration´.  I´ve learned how desperately I need to keep connected with my previous life and to find my own ways of integration into a new society. I´ve learned how difficult to keep the balance in the process of transition in between multiple tasks, priorities, relations, roles within the family, in the relationship with my partner and within my own life. I´ve learned a lot about the personal meanings of our taken for granted basic concepts such as culture, identity or home. I´ve learned what do I need to activate (again) my (even hidden) resources to feel empowered again. I have learned that sometime we need to afford to be weak and weakness does not necessarily mean powerless. Last but not least I also learned that I need more time and space than expected to arrive to a new state of my life.

 

The desperate events of the European refugee crisis confirmed my forming desire to devote more attention to the topics of transition, migration, integration.

In the last years my interest has turned more and more towards the topics of migration and life transitions: how various transitions in time and space have overlapping and interconnected impacts on our family life, relationships, intimacy, sexuality, such as :

• how new aims (or lost goals), new (or confused) identities, losses and new (or no) perspectives trigger changes in the relationships, impacts our man- and womanhood, our intimacies and eventually our sexual lives;
• how intimacy, sexuality, trust is maintained in relationships across long terms, distances or cultural differences

We have started In Touch Amsterdam to be able to devote more attention, time and active work on the topics of migration and integration.

Our goal is to facilitate the development of shared understandings of different and often antagonistic sexual, ethnic, religious cultures through organizing opportunities, spaces and activities for the members of these cultural groups to engage with each other in intimate, deeply personal, human interactions, where they can discuss, experience, live through and reflect upon their differences through the eyes of each other.

We can empower ourselves by sharing our personal experiences, by giving access to our inner and shared resources, by getting connected to others inner worlds.

Instead of the fragmented, and mediatized ways of modern life we focus on the first-hand human experience: we give birth, grow and learn, love and work, eat and think with the same body and soul.

We thus want to develop our projects in the personal domains of life, such as birth, growth, shelter, healing, sexuality (ars erotica), transition, mourning and death. We want to focus on the most fundamental aspects of human existence such as the human body, sexuality, eating, preparing and sharing food, family relations, intimacy, working, building shelter or mourning, stages which we all need to go through, and as such provide the most natural and effective opportunities for strangers to connect.