Last Friday evening, Temple University Rome and Sensi Holistic Creative Agency hosted a joint panel, “Identity Between Cultures.” Intrigued by the title, I was curious to hear what the panel was about. The panel brought together four individuals whose stories stretch across borders and disciplines: Alessandro Ralli, Tamara Hodak, Barry Souleymane, and Alina Vasieikina. These panellists also took part in our art therapy workshop just last week.
Panel: Identity Between Cultures
What surprised me was how clearly Alessandro’s research on the Third Space—the idea that identity forms in the gap between legal status and lived belonging—became visible through the lived experiences of the three other speakers. What he introduced in theoretical terms, they revealed in personal, tangible ways.
Alessandro framed identity as something continuously negotiated, shaped in those liminal moments when people find themselves between cultures, roles, or definitions of home. I’d encountered the concept before, but only in reading. Tonight, I saw it in motion.
When Tamara began speaking, the Third Space suddenly felt tactile. Her work takes place in circles of chairs, youth exchanges, and messy tables covered in markers and scrap paper—spaces where people learn about themselves by creating something together. She described facilitating workshops on digital well-being, community storytelling, and social inclusion, each one a moment where young people from different backgrounds begin to see themselves anew.
I couldn’t help thinking back to the collage I created at a workshop weeks ago—the way strangers became a community simply by sharing stories through bits of paper. Tamara’s world is full of those moments. She doesn’t just teach young people; she builds spaces where identity can shift, soften, or be reassembled. Through her work, Alessandro’s theoretical Third Space becomes a literal table where understanding begins.
Then Barry spoke, and the Third Space took on a different texture—one marked by movement, risk, and resilience. Born in Guinea Conakry, driven by political instability and a dream of telling stories through images, Barry’s journey to Italy was neither linear nor safe. Listening to him describe receiving his first camera at fourteen, fleeing an increasingly dangerous city, and eventually enrolling in a film school in Rome, I realized his entire adolescence unfolded in the in-between.
His art—portraits of friends who’d never posed before, short films made out of longing—seemed like his way of stitching together the fragments of a life shaped by displacement. If Alessandro described the architecture of the Third Space, Barry showed us what it feels like to live inside it: uncertain yet creative, fractured yet full of possibility.
And then there was Alina, whose voice brought a quiet emotional weight to the room. A Ukrainian artist who has lived in England, China, and Italy, she spoke of identity not as a fixed essence but as something reshaped by every move she made. Alina talked about how she moved to Italy in 2022 from China because of the Russian-Ukraine war outbreak, and her identity shifted from expat to refugee overnight. Through art, she found a way to hold all her past selves at once.
What struck me most was the steadiness with which she described upheaval. Her projects—films, exhibitions, intercultural collaborations—felt like attempts to build meaning out of transitions that could easily have broken her sense of self. She was not afraid to be vulnerable; she told us how she couldn’t get out of bed when she first arrived in Italy, because of how challenging it was to get her authorizations in check. With Alina, the Third Space becomes emotional terrain: the inner landscape where belonging is lost and rebuilt, where identity stretches to hold new realities.
By the time the panel ended, I felt as if Alessandro’s theory had been given a heartbeat. He offered the framework; Tamara, Barry, and Alina filled it with lived truth.
Leaving the room, I thought again about identity—how it’s less like a destination and more like a place we move through. A collage always in progress, shaped by the people we meet and the stories we choose to carry. And sometimes, it takes listening to four strangers to realize that theory lives inside us long before we learn its name. As my friends and I finish up the semester in Rome, I hope to keep noticing how identities around me shift and shape the culture here every day.
If you’d like to see the interesting activities Temple Rome organizes for its students, visit the Temple Rome program page on the Study Abroad Website. During your time abroad, you will have a plethora of opportunities to learn more about Italy, your environment, and yourself!