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About Us

Become/Belong uses knowledge of psychology and other disciplines critically to support the wellbeing of individuals and communities in a systemic approach with innovative (arts) interventions, that honours dignity, human rights, democratic participation and diversity.
Creativity as a tool to imagine, to dream and to make a bearable meaning out of suffering are cornerstones of healing.  Deleuze(*) views new connections and becomings being possible through the creation, arrangement and re-arrangement of perspectives and this enabled a deconstruction of the life-story as a combination of both, the real and the socially constructed as two part of the self. An endlessly transmutable social construction which agrees with Deleuze premise that a surface self serves as a plane of ‘becoming’, as opposed to a notion of self which has an internalised core of being.

Our international projects use the transformative power of the arts for community development and social cohesion, they use counselling as a tool for individual and collective growth.

(*) Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema: The Time Image. (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Transl.). University of Minnesota Press.

Please drop us an email and we will contact you in your preferred way of communication.
Email: become@syltfoundation.com.

Literary scholar, curator and writer Indra Wussow works as a coach using Narrative Therapy, Narrative Coaching and Transactional Analysis to support her clients in their wish to change and become their true selves.
Indra further obtained postgraduate degrees in Social Entrepreneurship (Gordon School of Business Science, South Africa) and Innovation and Design Thinking (MIT; Columbia University, Dartmouth University, US). She uses innovation tools in her projects to enable change systemically on a social, communal, individual and transgenerational level.
Indra has developed and worked extensively in community projects that connect counselling with arts practices and storytelling, especially in transforming countries such as South Africa, Chile, Myanmar and Cambodia. As a researcher and writer Indra investigates how post-atrocity societies engage with the past, along with how that violent past impacts the present and future and enables or disables reconciliation processes.

Dipl.-Psych. Ina Wolf-Bauwens is a clinical psychologist with her own practice in Hamburg/Germany. She specialised in trauma counselling, gestalt therapy and salutogenesis. Ina has worked with several organisations (public and private) on stress management, burn out prevention and uses systemic approaches in individual and community counselling. She has worked in several countries such as Cambodia and Uganda as counsellor and supervisor in individual and group contexts.
Ina is a public speaker of note and gives talks, lectures regularly to academic and professional audience as well as for a broader audience.

Our Project Partners

Rayka Kobiella, born in 1980 in Quaal, Schleswig-Holstein, studied literature and ethnology. She is a writer, theatre maker and activist and walks synergistically between theatre, performances & community work. In her work she explores our understanding of proximity and isolation, of understanding and misunderstanding in private as well as socio-political space. As a playwright and director, she has created plays such as "Akzentfrei" and "Wagen 10 - Eine Flüchtlingsbiografie" in Hamburg, "Life is overrated" and "Vestiges" in NYC, "Cut Into Pieces" in London. In the interdisciplinary collaboration "Killing Letters" with sculptor Anna Myga Kasten about killed journalists, she wrote the text.
Extended travels have taken her as a freelance writer and theatre-maker to New York, London, Denmark, Uganda, Morocco, South Africa and Southeast Asia, among other places. Since 2018, she has been the initiator and curator of the cultural centre and Think Tank "Toonda" in rural Uganda. She is a member of the performance company Label Gray NYC, the FREE(AK) SHOW (Uganda-Germany) and founded the performance collective for new music and text in an intercultural context DissOPERAlusion (Hamburg) together with Dr. Yijie Wang.

Madi van Schalkwyk is the founder and lead organiser of the 'Human Library South Africa'. She took the step a few years ago from “perfecting the art of ruining a family dinner" towards “finding really amazing people to talk to”. In the context of the Human Library, she creates a space and offers a structure, in which members of discriminated minorities or experiences in difficult topics can share their lived experiences and thus showcase the complex reality behind the simplified label that the wider society places on them. Together with a large community or volunteers, they enables and facilitate conversations that otherwise might never happen, creating opportunities for truly authentic, vulnerable exchanges and transformational learning experiences. Less interestingly (to her), she is a Freelance Graphic Designer with a degree in Visual Communication, a certificate in “The Rise of Superheroes…” and feels more comfortable in an awkward conversation than behind her designer desk. >> Roundabout