Creative Dialogue Workshop in the within of the As_Tide project
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Love Difference accompanied a group of artists from the A.S.T.I.D.E network and from Malta as well as researchers and the operators of the Marsa Open Centre in a process that gave the participants tools and methods for observation, listening, analysis and development.
The activities mainly aimed to strengthen the sense of belonging and participation in order to start collective creative processes. The creative practises learned during the workshop are currently being applied by the operators of the Marsa Open Centre.
INTRODUCTION
The work in the Marsa Open Centre for political asylum seekers (the MOC) illustrates some of the project and intervention methods of the Love Difference group.
The workshop (7-13 March 2009) is part of the larger As_Tide project, a promotional activity of Art for the Responsible Transformation of Society and Intercultural Dialogue in Europe, managed by Cittadellarte along with various international partners, with the support of the European Union Culture Programme.
Love Difference works in the project as co-curator of the activation workshops.
Together with the project partners in Malta- St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity and Atelier culture.projects- they identify the intervention context: a former school equipped to host 1500 immigrants requesting political asylum after a two year detention period. The centre serves as a temporary shelter for the refugees, which has the official purpose of facilitating their insertion into the Maltese population. Despite this noble premise, as things actually stand the Marsa Open Centre can be considered little more than a ghetto for the marginalised.
After several surveys, the energies, motivations and desire for change of the people living in the centre appear obvious, as well as those of the personnel running it.
To Love Difference the place seems ready to accept a process of active listening.
IL WORKSHOP
After identifying the persons with whom to interact, Love Difference accompanied the group (Emanuela Baldi, Filippo Fabbrica, Abdallah Daif, Noemi Satta from Love Difference; Natasha Borg, Sara Falconi from Atelier cul-ture.projects; Yolanda De Los Bueis, Christoph Schwarz from the A.S.T.I.D.E network of artists; Toni Attard, Herman Bashiron, Francis Debono, Caldon Mercieca, Daniel Schembri, Maltese artists and researchers; Etienne Attard, Silvio Brincat, Ahmed Bugre, Alison Busuttil, Vince Caruana, Adbulkadir Ahmed Hassan, Mohammed Abdullahi Hassan, Roger Langley, Ezana Messih, John Piscopo, Victor Scerri, Isabelle Sicot, operators of the Marsa Open Center) in a process that gave the participants tools and methods for observation, listening, analysis and development.
The activities mainly aimed to strengthen the sense of belonging and participation in order to start collective creative processes.
At the base of the Love Difference method there is a process which, through gathering the reactions, desires or criticisms of the individuals, reveals the shared dream. In effect, an individual takes part in a shared enterprise only if they recognise their desires, their values and feel like the protagonists of change.
The collective dream is what triggers the creative process and so change. The participation of each individual comes about through a shared vision that, to be brought into play, needs the energy of a group.
To arrive at this it was necessary to pass from the vision of the individual to that of the group. In this sense, activating a new relational process became the focal point of the process.
At the start, the organised activities included individual presentations, self-representation and the observation of others to let the participants get to know each other.
Then, split into small groups, the participants walked the route from the St James Center in Valletta, the location chosen for the first two days of the workshop, to the Marsa Open Center (MOC): for the workshop operators this was an opportunity to share the daily journey to work, even from an intimate and emotional point of view; for those arriving for the first time, this determined a change from the idea of the Center full of preconceptions and stereotypes, to a more personal point of view.
Entering the Center aroused feelings in everyone, both familiar and new but that had many common elements: it was on these that the group was to work over the days that followed.
Later the participants were asked to make a sketch that represented the relationship of each operator with the physical space of the Center, which showed what areas were used and for which activities, the preferred places and the reasons. The drawings were then shared and commented, highlighting the strong points, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the MOC (SWOT analysis) revealing numerous common elements as well as a fracture within the staff of the Center between the technical operators, responsible for managing the spaces, and the group of cultural mediators, both engaged on a daily basis and with great emotional involvement in concrete and practical activities.
In this phase, Love Difference decided to move to a more operative level.
Over the following days, the question was to rethink the Marsa Open Center: reprogram its activities, redesign the spaces and their utilisation.
Various modelling materials were provided: Lego bricks, plasticine, along with pencils, set squares, maps and architectural plans of the Center. The operators, technicians and cultural mediators found themselves working together on the shared dream of redesigning the Center.
In this process of rethinking the place, the element of play lightened the task and effectively assured the immediate reactivity of each person.
For the first time the operators began to dialogue in a constructive way, and unite. They had acquired strength from the process that had shown that, although engaged in very different activities, one more technical and the other more linked with the human sphere, they shared the same strengths and weaknesses, the sense of the future possibilities and the limits of the MOC. They found themselves in the right conditions to design a new ambient that responded to shared needs. The desire to bring improvements was common to all. Participated observation, without judgement, revealed shared and unconscious values, expectations, dreams and the impediments to their realisation.
They had moved from the individual dream to the identification of the collective dream.
The Marsa Open Center began to be seen from a new, regenerative perspective.
Further information about the As_Tide Networks: www.astide.eu
