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DRAFT dating from 2nd of
September 2003
Culture 2000 – exercise 2004
One-year project in the field of Cultural Heritage
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REACH UP! REAlising
the Cultural Heritage of eUropean
youth emPowerment
Playing, Painting and Speaking UP for a new understanding of cultural
self-determination
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Project leader: OŚRODEK KOLONIJNY
”JAGÓDKI (PL)
Coorganisers: -
OBLONG CREATIVE RESOURCE CENTRE (UK)
- CIFAES (ES)
- IKUWO e.V. (FRG)
further networking in Italy, the Czech republic, Denmark, France,
Hungary, Lithuania, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Rumania and
Greece
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Description: We challenge to
recombine the European dimension of cultural youth emancipation in East
and West for understanding our past, getting involved in our present
for the sake of our future. We operationalise this ambitious aim, by
rediscovering, practising and living up to the cross-border linkage of
its Cultural Heritage. Our understanding of heritage therefore seeks
beyond the artefacts of museum collections, beyond the promises of
virtual realities and the self-containment by supposed neutrality in
social sciences. REACH UP! endeavours to start a movement of living
memory and practice joining European bottom-up youth movements. A
cultural caravan through five countries in former East and former West
links some of the most structurally disadvantaged fringes of the
continent. Its target group are trainers (multiplicators) and
volunteers in the sphere of European youth culture and exchange.
In the course the caravans journey through Poland, Spain, the United
Kingdom, Italy and the Czech Republic, we set up cultural convergence
bivouacs at marginalised hot-spots of youth culture in a bi-monthly
rhythm. After getting to know the background, history and potential
participants in a country, work starts by probing different approaches
towards emancipatory playing. In changing mixes, responding to local
initiatives and needs, we bring together innovative toy museum
activists, actors and musicians who have acquired experience with
interactive pedagogy. They will be joined by gatherings of European
avant-garde street bands and street theatre groups, experimenting with
listener participation.
In a second step, professional and amateur visual artists will take up
their findings for a highly integrative form of collective wall
painting. The caravan’s strategy is to advance into innovative fields
of sustainable visual creation, by combining ancient techniques (low
cost – high human input) with new contents, such as a giant ceiling
fresco with mosaic patch-work on top of a 1000 m3 glass cube – the
conference hall of the project leader. The collective painting process
is designed as a continuation of the above mentioned first step
activities, documenting their results in a lasting visible form in
high-profile public spaces. Professional and experimental photography
will provide for wider proliferation and popularisation of the visual
results.
In a concluding step, the project gathers activists, professionals,
volunteers and participants for a dialogue on political implications of
their methodological findings. For this process, which is open by
nature, sophisticated inputs are being prepared by a multi-national
team of young artists and social scientists, employing various literary
forms and modes of presentation. An experimental laboratory deals with
political poetry and feminist rap. In a biographic historical workshop,
we trace back (and force) the links between each subsequent host land
and Spain sparked off by the Iberian civil war. Personal witnesses,
sons and a grand-daughters of Interbrigadistas give personal testimony
in Polish, English, Italian and Czech about a particularly unquieting
example in the heritage of cross-border movements on our continent. The
intention is to show multi-generational views how it was being defined
by conflicting interests both as a political and cultural revolt.
A result could be to document, how differently the Spanish experience
and its cultural expressions were reflected, radicalised and contained
by established interests in Eastern and Western host countries. The
outcome of the convergence bivouacs will be documented in national
publications and an experimental cross-language catalogue.
Offering these inputs in a process of trans-national dialogue and
practice in youth culture, the caravan attempts to inspire young people
with various social and educational backgrounds to join into an effort
to reach further Up... for a continent shaped by a politically
conscious quest for cultural and social self-determination. Cultural
heritage seen from this angle, is not exclusively a set of historic
objects to be restored for future sight-seeing but rather complex a
legacy of efforts to bring about change and its social conditions to
become familiar with.
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Objectives:
The REACH UP! caravan endeavours to link five
supposed edges of Europe and its underprivileged strata of youth in
rural Spain, Italy and Poland as opposed to urban, industrial sites in
the UK and the Czech Republic. They will evolve a sustainable added
value at the five convergence bivouacs, revitalising the European
dimension of cultural heritage akin to youth emancipation. A
substantial, expressive result linking the fields of playing, painting
and speakingUp can be communicated to other partners in further
European countries. A exhibition of work in progress at the convergence
sites touring in countries yet omitted by the caravan, will both
interest further multiplicators to join the process and inform about
preliminary results, possible failures and lessons learnt.
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What
activities are planned?
A caravan linking five cultural convergence bivouacs
combining playing, painting and speakingUp in Poland, Spain, the UK,
Italy and the Czech Republic. Professional cultural workers and
volunteers will change the focus site of action every two months.
Ort und Termine der
Projektaktivitäten sowie deren Laufzeit.
Where and when will these
take place, and how long will they last?
The first convergence bivouac will cover the months of August and
September 2004 at the applicant’s seaside resort on the Polish-Russian
Baltic border. The resort itself is designed for offering vacations to
underprivileged children and teenagers, mainly from orphan backgrounds,
urban and rural poor. It is situated in a region suffering severely
from structural back-sets. The Spanish (October and November 2004) and
Italian (April and May 2005) sites are marked by provincial centres
with severe deficits in infrastructure for youth culture. The sites in
the UK (February and March 2005) and the Czech Republic (June and July
2005) are shaped by partly derelict industrial settings under severe
restructuring. Youth culture infrastructure suffers major structural
backlashes in many fields. Task action opens channels of communication
and exchange to each respective capital of the countries under bivouac.
What are the objectives of
the project and how will these be achieved?
- Provide for a substantial gain in experience for
trainers (multiplicators), professionally active in cultural youth
initiatives by enhancing and experimenting with outbound activities;
- Integrating participants and volunteers at different
and appropriate levels of commitment by offering different sizes and
different forms of involvement;
- Reaching a broad media audience in the region and
beyond by practically showing the inter-disciplinary character of youth
culture movements, covering playing, visual arts and textual interfaces
with social sciences.
Who will benefit from the
project?
Young people from different educational and social
backgrounds in periphery regions of poor infrastructure for youth
culture.
Dates: 1/8/2004-31/7/2005
Community grant: 126.000,- €
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