In early 2025, I co-facilitated Encountering Atmospheric Elements, a hands-on space-making workshop for children and families at MPavilion in Melbourne. It was a beautiful day - lots of sun and just a little bit of wind, which was perfect for the work we were doing. We had a great turnout of over thirty participants, and there was a certain buzz and playfulness right from the start. Down the middle of Tadao Ando’s pavilion, we lined up multiple trestles end to end to create one massive, continuous table. We piled it high with materials specifically chosen for their capacity to be activated by light and air: reflective surfaces, things that glittered and shone, wire, pliers, armatures, skewers, cellophane, raffia, string, and masking tape.

Throughout the workshop, play and experimentation took over. Participants took turns trying on their new wearables as they were constructed, testing them in different conditions to see how the materials interacted with the pavilion's light, shadows, and reflections. Part of our job as facilitators - alongside my Monash colleagues Danica Karaičić and Gyungju Chyon - alonside helping with the making process itself, was simply to be delighted by what people were making, drawing their attention to the novel ways their creations were altering the air and light around them. By all accounts, it was a highly engaging, joyful, and successful experimental encounter.

Reflecting on the workshop, however, the most interesting moment for me happened right at the very beginning, before anyone had picked up materials and started making.

To ground the group at the very beginning of the workshop, I facilitated a brief sensory attunement exercise, asking participants to close their eyes, to place their hand on their chest and their stomach, and tune into their breath and the ambient heat of the concrete of the pavilion. This kind of somatic attunement is an activity I had been practising and facilitating for several years, and it forms the backbone of my resonance practices. Drawing on my experiences as a Vipassana meditator, these slow, gentle body scans are designed to draw attention inwards. Here, I used the facilitation to specifically help people feel the elements - guiding them to notice light as heat in their bodies, and the movement of air on their skin and in their hair. Previous iterations of this activity that I had run at Melbourne Design Week the year prior, and through WonderLab’s playtest formats, had always landed beautifully, serving as a really effective way of grounding people in their bodies before beginning activity-based material entanglement.

But this time, something was different. While it wasn't immediately apparent to me at the time, upon reflection it becomes clear that the spatial container of MPavilion profoundly complicated the participants' capacity to engage with the activity. The pavilion is a highly porous structure with multiple programmes operating simultaneously. Our group wasn't alone, wasn't protected, and wasn't held safely. Instead, we were being watched by crowds of people queuing for ice cream and groups accessing the on-site cafe. There was an audience for this practice. The lack of privacy immediately affected the group’s ability to enact the vulnerability I was asking of them, so when I issued the invitation to close their eyes, many refused, watching the proceedings with visible discomfort.

As I continued to move through the meditation practice, I became highly sensitive to a rising tide of unease. It was as though the collective sense of unsafeness did not remain isolated to the individuals refusing the prompts, but travelled through the open air and wrapped itself around me. I began to experience the crowd's shared discomfort as a growing physical tightness, an anxiety pooling in my solar plexus. I found myself stuttering, losing my place in the prompts, and becoming increasingly self-conscious, until I finally decided to abandon the exercise entirely.

I had previously understood, in a quite intellectual way, that space-makers and facilitators become sensitive to the psychological and emotional states of the people they are holding space for. But having this first-hand, visceral encounter with that collective sense of unsafeness - feeling almost as though I had been dipped in a bath of it - was a profound lesson in how the bodies of practitioners become directly implicated in the felt conditions of a therapeutic place. It goes beyond just the physical environment; it is deeply relational. The body-mind worlds of practitioners become entangled with the felt experiences of the people they support. There is a continuous, reciprocal reach-and-return between the person holding space and the people being held, especially when working in such an intimate and vulnerable way. This was the first time I was really able to access the depths of that reciprocity, and it brought a vital aspect of the relationship between care provision and spatial experience to the surface. When an environment fails to provide its promise of holding - just as it did at MPavilion - the labour of holding space does not disappear. It transfers directly onto the caregiving bodies within the room. When a participant feels deeply unsafe, that lack of safety is felt bodily by the practitioner, who then has to grapple with it somatically and emotionally.