💗 About Skinship

Skinship is a touched base place for kinship centering queer/ trans/ non binary / femme people. We are a fluid collective of around 20 international artists, bodyworkers, performers, scientists, magicians, myth makers, dancers, sexworkers, and pleasure activists. Melanie Bonajo, Ayo Gry Jonassen, and Pawel Dudus founded Skinship in May 2020.

 

💗 Values

Celebrating life and diversity in connection to the body is core to our values, and an act of resistance. We believe that we change when we are in community. If you feel something, we probably feel it too. Where there is awareness there is more agency, and with more agency comes more access to choice. By empowering choice, we empower voice.

 

We change when we feel safe. Feeling safe starts as sensations in our bodies. Not in our mind. When our feelings are felt and welcomed, we can move and connect and get access to joy, pleasure and create intimacy with each other.

 

Most of our survival strategies are numbing out in order to stay safe. We like this to change and want to listen and feel our senses again. We want to learn, again, to listen to the wisdom of our body in order to feel safe.

 

By relating to and with our bodies, we create a space where resilience and capacity for change can happen. Skinship is a space where caring for each other in the chaos of the unknown, is rooted in our bodies - not only in ideas or good intentions. To cultivate our bodies to sense and feel belonging within ourselves, cultivate space to care for our friends, and for the stranger on the street. 

 

💗 How we do that

As part of Skinship we use multimedia as a way to connect and create. Suchs as films, sound recordings, social media, and online live video shows. A part of Skinship has been physically manifested in over 100 workshops and community events in Berlin, Copenhagen and Zurich. Our methods are always bodybased, pleasure oriented, experimental and play and humor are used as a gateway for connection. We use somatic practices, radical self expression, games, exercises, that support body awareness and interfere with our patterns and habits - to create somatic openings for embodied change. 

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