Welcome to Paris - the art of arrival.
For whom?
We propose this session to newcomers in Paris, in particular to people who do not start work immediately, such as men or women accompanying their expatriate spouses.
Why?
A change in cultural environment can be a unique opportunity for learning and change. However it also comes with some well studies challenges: discontinuity of the professional identity, break in social interactions, episodes of culture shock etc. All these challenges simultaneously can make us experience more stress and more anxiety than what we’re used to. So it’s worth to add a touch of mindfulness to this process of adaptation.
How?
These sessions are a combination of encounters with art works in museums and hands-on workshops in training room. In dialogue with the artworks or through the use of drawing and collage we tackle some key issues in the adaptation to a new cultural environment: how to handle the newness, the loss of social network and routine, how to overcome experiences of culture shock and how to use the opportunity to rethink who we are in a creative way.
Culture shock and adaptation
Cross-cultural or intercultural adaptation refers to how we feel, think, behave when we find ourselves in a foreign land. A new continent, a new country, or a new city can all seem like a whole new planet. Adaptation is about how we react to its newness, and how we change to be able to connect to it. The difficulty of the exercise is that changes are ought to happen simultaneously on many different levels, as if we were inscribed to a psychological gymnastics’ competition trying to handle vault, uneven parallel bar and balance beam all at once. Being a stranger in Paris for instance, implies that we have to become familiar French grammar, what’s worse, a delicate orthography, which uses eight letters to write down a word of four sounds. And beyond the formal rules of grammar there is the big set of less precise rules of politeness, of conveying respect, of understanding hierarchy etc. Should we try to use humour to lighten the embarrassment, we may realise that most of our favourite jokes are lost in translation. Even our apparence may change: the colours we like to wear can seem disturbingly flashy against a backdrop where people express subtlety by wearing greyscale.
In fact, the first lesson in cross-cultural adaptation is that it is never just about “the new culture”: yes, there is a new set of rules, norms but that there is also an old one (or maybe even several older ones) with a well known sense of what is friendly, funny, and appropriate. The new norms, values, practices do not arrive into an empty space, but to a space already formatted with the norms, values, behaviours of our first cultures. And it is the encounter between these different sets of norms and practices that can create culture shock, as well as learning.
Art, arrival, adaptation in our workshops
For us, the key learning point in our workshop is not an “abc” of “French culture”. Such a take would not only be a theoretical and methodological mistake, but it would miss the opportunity to tackle the real challenge in the process of adaptation, which is to find the balance between who we had been so far and who we can be in the new environment. In this journey we find art a most useful companion. The learning path we propose includes:
inviting the encounter with art works to learn about encounter with otherness, handling difference
using the artistic form as visual support to explore our identities, our needs and desires
embodied activities, simulations, drama games to “de-mechanise” our usual routines in interaction and develop creative ways to communicate in the new environment
These sessions are not therapeutical, not clinical, rather they offer the tools each person can adapt for herself in her own way.