Voices Between Bodies

Sweden is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity, yet monolingual norms continue to dominate performing arts, education, and psychological practice. As a result, multilingual experiences often remain unheard or silenced, despite the fact that language — including dialects, childhood languages, and lost or suppressed languages — is deeply embodied and intertwined with memory, affect, and belonging. Such linguistic silencing can reinforce subtle forms of exclusion and power. Voices Between Bodies is an interdisciplinary artistic research project that brings together psychology, performing arts, and sociolinguistics to explore the relationship between language, identity, and embodied expression. The project approaches language as lived, bodily experience and develops an embodied dialogical method through which participants investigate their linguistic repertoires using language portraits, movement, listening, and collective sound composition.

Through artistic collaboration, languages are activated as affective, biographical, and political resources rather than deficits. A central artistic outcome is a sound work composed entirely of voices, creating a space in which multilingual expressions are not only audible but also recognized as legitimate. By shifting attention from seeing to listening, and from individual expression to relational composition, the project opens new ways of engaging with voice, power, and identity.

The project aims to develop methods applicable within performing arts, research, education, and psychological practice, while contributing to broader discussions on participation, democracy, and linguistic justice. By foregrounding the embodied and emotional dimensions of language, the project seeks to reduce minority stress and strengthen participants’ sense of agency and belonging.

Participants in the Project 

Vanja Hamidi Isacson is a Swedish Finnish playwright and artistic researcher based in

Malmö, Sweden. She is an affiliated guest researcher at Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University. In 2022, she earned her doctorate from Stockholm University of the Arts with a thesis titled ”The Potential of Multilingualism in Dramatic Works”. Project leader of several multilingual projects within the performing arts in the Nordics. Hamidi Isacson was also a co-founder of the multilingual theatre company Teater JaLaDa in Malmö. 

Sima Nurali Wolgast is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a licensed psychologist and psychotherapist. She is involved in several ongoing artistic projects and research initiatives. In addition to her work in the artistic field, she teaches social psychology and psychotherapy, areas in which she is also conducting research. Her scholarly work focuses on developing methodological approaches that integrate psychological and psychotherapeutic knowledge across diverse contexts, including the performing arts. In recent years, she has created several artistic works, some of which have also served as research projects. In 2025, she contributed to Vanja Hamidi’s artistic project, acting as the facilitator of the dialogic processes that shaped the work.