I have been training SPEX facilitators since 2012, and now more than 60 have completed the training, mostly women and mostly Italians but also from Spain, Germany, New Zealand and France. Each of them gives her a powerful account of their own personal experience and about their work with others. Most of them were not photographers or artists, but look at their powerful images! I’ll be adding new facilitators, so check out this page again in a few weeks!

Carlotta Belloni

Carlotta Belloni @rliecha, social worker, dramatherapist and SPEX facilitator, writes:

‘For me, this course was not only a professional growth and acquisition of skills, but a real work on myself. This made it really valuable, because thanks to Cristina, but also thanks to the group, I was able to work on my limits and resources. I learnt not to take anything for granted and realise that to become a good spex facilitator, you have to be able to listen to yourself and to others.

Learning in the workshop I believe is the best way to learn, you observe and practice at the same time. This is also a characteristic that is difficult to find in academic training. The closeness created with Cristina and colleagues allowed us to deepen our way of relating to each other, to authority and to the world in general.

We were able to share, for months, without even seeing each other in person, a depth that is achieved through years of knowledge and trust. It is a complete training, where you don’t need to learn notions by heart, but you have to put your guts into it!’

Anna Ghittino

Anna Ghittino, @ghittinoanna, art-therapist and SPEX facilitator writes:

For me this experience was a journey of professional and emotional growth. I learned to relate to a group that, despite the physical distance, came together, became cohesive and strong, with a solid foundation; this was also thanks to Cristina’s ability to unite and bring people together, as if by magic. Being able to follow Cristina closely has given me so much, as always seeing her at work stirs my insides, a bit like an earthquake, leaving me with traces, fixed points from which I can learn, grow and evolve more and more. The training of facilitators has been and will be a deep and intense journey that I will never abandon. The passion that has pervaded me during this journey accompanies me in everything I do, Cristina’s strength and dedication has infected me, now I live more, with the awareness that our ‘shit’ is not something dark to hide, on the contrary, we build something positive from all this pain from all this shit. Sharing your emotions with others certainly lightens them and makes them easier to manage, to understand and to learn. Thanks to my work with Cristina I have also learnt that pain can be something beautiful, it can be transformed and re-transformed an infinite number of times, we don’t have to hide it or be ashamed of it, and then we can move on to something else. It was truly a unique experience, meeting people with the same interests as me and creating a group with all the dynamics that this entails, the reversal of power roles that emerge in daily conflicts that thanks to Cristina we learned to manage and face. Before this experience I used to avoid conflicts, I didn’t speak up and I never said what I thought, I preferred to avoid confrontation. Now, even if I still find it difficult, I can express myself better, I don’t run away and I face situations, even the ones I don’t like.

 

Eleonora Rettori

Eleonora Rettori, @eleonorarettori photographer and SPEX facilitator, says:

‘Facilitator training with Cristina is really an experiential training in the artist workshop, like in the Renaissance. She follows you, stays behind you, stimulates you, stirs up conflicting emotions and puts you to the test. The test of your emotional power and ability to work on your own emotions and those of others.

The focus of my path was mainly to recognise myself together with my deafness. It was a search for my experience, my pain and my inner anger. Showing my vulnerability to the group and to Cristina helped me face the constant judgement that pervaded me, both past and present. My emotional blocks somehow let go and my deafness became one of my artistic expressions.

I realise that I have overcome that barrier of fear of the public and of showing myself as I am. The people who do the course with you get to choose you because you are YOU.’

Simona Giovanditti

Simona Giovanditti, @simona_giovanditti_psy , psychotherapist, mindfulness coach and SPEX facilitator, says:

‘I chose to become a Spex facilitator while I was attending the full online workshop with Cristina; I was witnessing such transformations within myself that I felt I didn’t want to leave this ‘world’. I was tasting how powerful this device was and felt the need to learn how to handle it with care.
I learnt to use self-portraiture as a tool to connect deeply with others: with self-portraiture I bare myself, show my humanity and help others to do the same. To accompany another human being along the same path is a privilege I am grateful for, to witness the journey towards one’s own infinite potential identities is moving. When we drop our defences, everything touches our hearts.
I felt I was very much followed by Cristina, who looks at you, sees you, pushes you to bring out even what you would like to hide. At the same time, there was space to look for my own way of being a facilitator, with my personal and professional characteristics. It is a very practical training, sometimes you feel lost, then you learn to use this emotion to become a better facilitator. All the emotions that come up, the insecurities, the conflicts, the group dynamics, everything that we hate and that instead is wonderfully human, everything is used to become better facilitators.’

Marilena Pisciella

Marilena Pisciella @marilenapisciella is a psychotherapist, psycho-oncologist, artist, writer and SPEX facilitator. She writes:

In the wake of my transition from maturity to menopause, I came across SPEX. But it would be more correct to say ‘I met Cristina’. More than 13 years have passed and, as I say in my visual autobiography “Uncanny”, SPEX changed my life, the way I see myself and the world. SPEX represents a break between the before and after. I arrived almost by chance at the first workshop of emotions – I remember – struggling with a severe crisis: the changes in my body, the harshness and fatigue of the role of psychotherapist with which I seemed to have merged and confused over the years, and above all not knowing how to feel what the horizon might be towards which to set sail. Even though I had tried to get back into the game with a new analysis, I realised that a third analysis wouldn’t work. I didn’t have the words to describe what was wrapped up inside me. From the start, SPEX helped me to create and see the words, then little by little visual narratives and then again senses and meanings of what was moving inside. In the self-portraits I found the unexpressed words.

Words struggle to emerge when they are stranded in the right hemisphere, mainly due to trauma, as neuropsychoanalysis tells us. And the left hemisphere is unable to deeply rework what it cannot ‘see’ because it is located ‘beyond the word’. The SPEX programme was like Pandora’s box, opening the visionary doors of the unconscious and all that was blocked and kept inside me. SPEX is not just about being in front of the camera, but it’s the relationship with Nuñez that stimulates you to read/see the multiple meanings of your works, that also stimulates you to draw meanings from the relationship with her, that stimulates you to explore yourself through the process and the production of self-portraits.

SPEX revolutionised me. My relationship with Cristina, very complex and multi-faceted, changed me, stimulated me, made me grow. But above all it opened the door to creativity for me.

In 2017 I was diagnosed with cancer: having the SPEX tools allowed me to ‘look at myself’ well beyond this stigma. The result was a visual autobiography and a dummy-book – Butterfly Blues – which received selections and awards in various national and international competitions. The new human-professional direction for onco-humanities became increasingly clear.

All this research into myself and into humanity and living things through images is nothing more than following a new existential mission and direction.

Chiara Digrandi

Chiara Digrandi, @chiara.digrandi, psychologist, art-therapist and SPEX facilitator, writes:

For me SPEX was and is a journey that has allowed me to reach deep places, that has provided me with fertile and unique ground for exploring the multiple aspects of my relationships. It is a unique space that I turn to in difficult moments, when I am most vulnerable, saddest, angriest. It is a continuous opportunity for growth.

I met Cristina in 2010. I had heard about her in Finland and when I returned to Italy I contacted her. I did the first workshop on the method and immediately saw its potential for exploring and discovering other aspects of myself. It was moving.

My relationship with Cristina and SPEX began at that moment. I started to work alongside her in workshops she did around Italy, eager to experience everything that SPEX generated in people, eager to learn.

After a few months I left for Peru where I lived for a year and it was there that I started to use the method under Cristina’s supervision, in prisons, shelters and orphanages. Those who took part gained greater self-awareness and self-consciousness. Contact with their own image, an image to which they were completely unaccustomed, made them stronger and more confident. I continued to use the method in various contexts, especially in Italy, in companies, in training groups, with teenagers, etc.

Seeing something new, different, unknown, learning to love those images that at first were rejected, perceiving beauty in pain, being free, feeling free from one’s own and other people’s judgement, letting oneself be surprised, are all aspects that have emerged in my work as a facilitator. It is a continuous gift to be able to witness all this, the movements that are unleashed in people’s inner selves, the changes in vision thanks to the work of perception that at times seems magical. It is a gift to have the task and the responsibility of supporting all this.

I read some of the comments made by the young people in the workshops held in Peru:

– Looking at the photos I feel changed, I don’t feel sad like before and I would like to fly.

– When I saw the photographs the first time, my first thought was ‘I have to fulfil something in my life’.

– I want to tell others that self-portraits can help you and change the way you act.

– While I was doing the self-portraits I felt excited because I want to know who I am, what I am like, and why I am the way I am.

– With the self-portraits I have freed myself from something.

– I was nervous, before I felt sad, then angry, then happy. I liked it because I let go of my emotions, of everything I was feeling inside.

– At the end of the self-portrait session I let go, I felt calmer in my relationship with my body. I have overcome things.

– Thanks to this workshop, I have somehow got to know myself better.

– After talking to Chiara, I no longer thought that the photos were ugly, but that they expressed something about me. Those photos represent who I am inside.

– I have realised that the photos speak for themselves. Sometimes I recognise myself, sometimes I don’t because I express a lot of hidden feelings.

– The workshop really helped me in my despair. I let out all my emotions and expressed them, and when I finished I felt very liberated.

– I practically let out all the bitterness I had inside. I never thought I would let out those kinds of emotions.

– When I looked at the photos I was impressed, I don’t know if I wanted to cry or laugh, I don’t know what I felt, but I do know that I felt good, really good.

Feedback from a woman from the women’s prison in Arequipa (Peru).

‘I let go of a lot of things, I let off steam, I found my past again. My whole life passed before me, from when I was a child, to the time I was on the street, to when I left my children, to the present day. I remembered what I have suffered, not being able to shout from a very young age, not being able to cry without someone looking at me or telling me to ‘shut up’. I did it, I cried uncontrollably. Afterwards I felt a peace, a tranquillity like saying ‘it’s over now’, I felt good. It has helped me a lot to live through this moment, because what I haven’t been able to do in so many years, I’ve done in 15 minutes if I’m not mistaken, I’ve let go of a lot of things there. I feel better, I feel calmer, I no longer have that knot that I kept here’.

‘The first time I saw the photos, I saw myself as ugly and horrible, I saw myself as a complete stranger. Later, I began to understand that the photos taken with feelings or emotions are the most beautiful because they come from within. My first photos were a thousand questions, if it was me or who. I realised that it really helped me to change my thinking, every time I had the session I felt liberated. I remembered my whole past and it was very beautiful because I was able to release everything I had been carrying inside for years, it helped me to feel free, totally free.