WONDER
What is our place in the cosmos?
An open-ended creative experience
Discover how a memory, an image, or a moment of curiosity can become the beginning of something you create—and something you share.
WONDER begin with darkness, in the First Moon; then the journey veers abruptly into the Light, the birth of a Cosmos, Archetype cards, and an invitation to share a story. These encounters bring forward what we call proto-stories: moments of discovery that continue to shape how we see, feel, and imagine. Through words, images, and exchange with others, participants begin to give these stories a new form.
Territory
Proto-stories · Personal Mythology · Archetypes · Chaos → Cosmos
The framework
- Activation
- Personal Myth
- Creative Contamination
- Zero Draft
We awaken curiosity, explore a personal story, allow it to meet other people’s ideas and perspectives, and create a first expression of what emerges. This shared framework opens into different creative processes as art forms and materials enter the experience.
Creative Outcomes
Story Maps · Oral storytelling · Poetry · Songwriting · Voice + Sound
The chosen form shapes the later stages of the experience. A Zero Draft is a first expression: something to explore, share, and develop. For a group exploring collective songwriting, a story map becomes a shared compass, keeping creators aligned while leaving room for different voices and discoveries.
- Audience
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Educators, authors, artists, designers, and teams
interested in imagination, storytelling, and
collaborative creation.
No previous artistic experience is needed. - Duration
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Half day | Full day | Weekend of two full days.
The depth of exploration and available creative forms vary with the format.
This workshop meant stepping through a portal, seeking a way into a hidden, half-asleep layer of my consciousness—something deeply personal, yet universal and shared with others.
Allowing images and stories to surface, offering them to my fellow participants, letting them intertwine with theirs and finally merge into a single narrative.
A collective process held by Lazzaro’s magical guidance, connecting and amplifying our energies. Simply extraordinary!
— Annalisa Califano, Photographer
The birth of a personal myth
We live in a time when so much feels possible, and so much feels fragile. The stories we inherit shape what we believe the world can become. They influence who belongs, what we value, and which futures we are able to imagine. What stories might we bring into being if we gave ourselves time to listen more deeply?
WONDER opens The Nine Moons with an invitation to give voice to a personal beginning: an encounter, a departure, a discovery, a moment that changed our relationship with the world. Through mythic imagination, that experience becomes material we can shape, speak, and share.
Gradually, a personal origin myth takes shape. Each participant gives it a voice, finding its rhythm, its silences, and the images that ask to be heard. Oral storytelling and sonic experimentation become vessels for these myths, carrying their archetypal echoes into a shared listening space.
The birth of a personal myth: your invitation and the curiosity behind your practice.
From Chaos to Cosmos workshops
I designed and hosted two workshops in Italy exploring mythic imagination, archetypes, and oral storytelling.
These gatherings are part of the story behind WONDER.
The birth of a personal myth: your invitation and the curiosity behind your practice.
From chaos to cosmos
Sometimes an image stays with us before we understand why. A house we have never visited. An animal appearing in a dream. A landscape that feels strangely familiar. We carry it quietly, until an encounter, a memory, or someone else’s words give it somewhere to unfold.
Mythic storytelling begins with this kind of attention. We make room for what draws us closer, even when we cannot explain it yet. A small detail may hold the entrance to a much larger story.
Somewhere among these fragments, a Protostory begins to stir. It may arrive as the memory of a departure, a discovery, a loss, or a moment when the world suddenly felt different. It has no clear shape yet. We follow it through images, words, and conversation, listening for what it might become.
As we follow, other figures enter. An explorer stands at the threshold. A trickster unsettles what seemed certain. A stranger offers something we did not know we needed. These archetypal presences have travelled through stories for centuries, yet each encounter gives them a new face. We recognize them through the choices, desires, and contradictions of our own lives.
Wonder lives in that meeting between the intimate and the immense. A memory that belongs to one person finds an echo in an ancient tale. An image shared across the table awakens something in someone else. Our stories remain our own, but they begin to speak to one another.
Together, we give these encounters a form. Images become places. Memories become passages. Characters discover paths between worlds that once seemed separate. A personal cosmos takes shape within a constellation of other voices—each bringing something the whole could not have imagined alone.
We begin with something that calls to us.
We follow it until a world opens.
