Walking Identity: The Labyrinth as a living systemic practice - Option 1

Systemic spaces often invite us to speak about identity yet offer fewer methods for working with how identity is actually lived, encountered and reshaped in the moment. This proposal responds to that gap by offering the labyrinth as a continuous, embodied space held across the conference, with a day two workshop that engages with what has been encountered through participation.

The labyrinth will be available throughout, inviting participants to walk  and visit at different points during the conference. Drawing on the Lyon design (previously run at EFTA Conference Lyon 2025), it will include a small number of play stations around the themes of blossoming, gifting and recycling, where participants can leave words or brief reflections that emerge in the process. A visitors book enables the production of warm data from participants and an opportunity to gather their reflections of their time with the Labyrinth.  This represents a dynamic collective of responses, not an accumulation of individual accounts, but a trace of how people move, respond and make meaning as the conference unfolds.

The focus is identity: not as something fixed or declared, but as something we carry into the room and reshape in interaction. Walking the labyrinth offers an embodied way of noticing our responses to uncertainty, proximity, interruption and return—conditions that sit at the heart of systemic practice.

As participants return to the labyrinth, their responses shift. What is noticed changes. What is written changes. In this way, identity is not simply expressed yet reworked through participation and context.

An ethnographic sensibility underpins the design. Participants are both in the experience and noticing it. The words and fragments left behind are treated as traces of process, which can be revisited and thought with, rather than analysed or resolved.