PERFORMING A GARDEN. EMBODIED PRACTICES FOR COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH

Abstract

Following the agreement between the Local Health Authority, ASL Napoli 1 Centro, and Suor Orsola Benincasa University with its related Action Plan ‘SmArtLab’, in March 2021, the Child Neuropsychiatry unit and the group working on Embodied Education began carrying out a research for developing a highly integrated socio-health service.
This was the first step to link Pedagogy and its phenomenological background, Neuroscience and the “embodied turning point” with the Mental Health field.
SmArt Lab aims at changing the current medical caring practices in order to move towards a "Caring society". It promotes a new approach focused on the development of the whole community and territory in its complex relational systems and processes.
We work on the sensitivity and plasticity of the human body, making bodies and spaces, with their tactility and mobility, the ''living material'' to be generatively reconnected.  
The embodied practices, introduced through experimentation and prototyping activities, precisely identify the relational issues and provide an epistemic and methodological trajectory for a work aimed, practically and symbolically, at "(per)forming a garden".
The garden is both a metaphor and the 'real' place where we re-think life as a model to re-construct bio-logically oriented social and health practices.
The Living creature (Dewey, 1934) and its process of life/existence within a body/space/community/territory makes the innovation of a Public Health System worthwhile: we are observing and studying its plastic dynamic transformation.
To "feed" the living creature and its life/existence process, Embodied Education
methodology works with both bodies and spaces, in their vital and plastic mobility, in order to make them part of the autopoietic domains of existence (Maturana-Varela, 1980).