Nomadways

🎁 We are super happy to share with you a small treasure born during ‘The Power of CLOWNnection’, held in France last year!

For ten days, youth workers, artists, and educators from five countries explored how the art of the clown can nurture emotional education, empathy, and joy in young people. Together, participants created 41 oracle cards, capturing the wisdom, humour, and humanity discovered through play.

Each card is a small sneak-peak into the philosophy of the clown to remind you to stay curious, open, and fully alive.

Meet the ‘Clown Wisdom Oracle’! 🔮
You can download the cards and print + cut them yourself at home.

Find them in our links in bio.

Workshop memories photo dump! 🔥🔥🔥

“Emotional Education” was a 12-day Erasmus+ training course (17–28 November 2025, Milhac, France) exploring how emotions shape our bodies, our inner worlds, and our collective imagination.
Rather than focusing on how to “manage” emotions or trying to “fix” them as if they were problems or diseases, the intention was different: to recognise, name, and stay with what emerges, while remaining in dialogue with the world around us.

We explored this through a combination of artistic practices, mainly plastic arts with a focus on visual expression such as drawing, painting, collage, and sewing, together with collective reflection and body-based activities, especially dance and theatre preparation. All of this took place within a non-formal education framework, creating a space where head, heart, and hands could work together.
At the beginning, many of us struggled.

We cannot just acknowledge there is an emotion manifesting in us or in another, we need to “solve” it! “Are you sad? Let me cheer you up!” kind of attitude. And by observing this dynamic we finally saw that the need to “solve” the emotion another person may be experiencing, speaks more about ourself and the fact we are in discomfort seeing someone else suffering and need to feel useful takes us far from simply being present and testify that emotion is in the room.

We started from this in a harsh way, with some resistance because we are taught like this. And then slowly, step by step, we learned how to approach emotions without rushing to act on them. We practiced staying present, giving them names, describing their textures, locating them in the body, and creating safe, artsy and participative spaces where others could do the same.

Was one of a kind path! And along the way, we discovered how emotional education can nurture empathy, acceptance, and authentic communication, first within ourselves, and subsequently in our work with youth.

Our Erasmus+ project CLOWNnection took place from 1st to 12th September in Vayrac and was a joyful success!

Together with our dream team (Bruno, Julia, Ilaria, and Pauline), we welcomed 26 youth workers from France, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, and Latvia. We explored the art of clowning as a way to connect, communicate, and bring authenticity into youth work.

The setting: surrounded by the wild, beautiful nature of the Dordogne river, ancient trees, and silent old caves tucked into the hill behind us. This environment was perfect for our experience, because it helped us to get grounded, to slow down and align to our pace, as it was a constant invitation back to the present moment (thank you, dear chickens!).

And presence was the essence of our work: exploring clowning as a deep practice of simply being here. It meant not projecting into the future or staying trapped by past fears, but truly being present with the body, with our own emotions, and with each other.

This is a truth well-known to youth workers: presence is everything.

We also explored visual language in the same spirit. Letting go of adult fears like “I don’t know how to draw” (or the hidden belief that we should draw like Leonardo da Vinci) and moving towards something much more useful:
“What I draw is good enough to support the message I want to communicate.”
We drew, mapped, and marked experiences as they were: not perfect, who cares really?! But honest, alive, and meaningful.

Clowning and visual facilitation finally met through a closing event of “conférence gesticulée”! A living, embodied way to merge contents, visual languages, performing, and storytelling.

Two disciplines that may seem far apart, yet are both deeply rooted in listening, presence, and letting things flow. 💛

It’s a bittersweet day for us, as we say goodbye to the caring and supportive group of our Emotional Education course.

Over the past 10 days, we have explored how art and movement can help us express, understand, and navigate our emotions - and connect more deeply with one another.

Words never fully capture what we feel, but here are a few from our participants about how this experience has touched them:

🌱''This project helped me to learn more about delicate topics like emotions and feelings and to make them more accessible, engaging and fun. It surely inspired for some new ideas and activities I can implement in my future work.''

🌱''It was a transformative experience for me. I think sometimes it went somehow too deep into the topic in an unexpected and unpredictable way even for the trainers who found the right and appropriate strategies to change that and make it nice and extremely interesting, and not heavy.''

🌱''The personal relationships made a huge impact on me, the collective creation of the group, the cohesive facing of adversity and the will to support oneself and mutually, each other. I stopped seeing myself as an isolated being and recognize myself, though individual, collective and connected. Main gain: human connection, sense of universal love and care, the realization that I can hold myself and be held at the same time. That people care.''🌱