December 14th, 2018
Laboratori d’identitats is a project that we carry out with 12-15 teenagers from Espai Jove in Pineda de Mar. The aim of this project is to work with young people who, for origin reasons, might have felt discriminated, with this idea of how we can turn socially these individualities and feel empowered to overcome them.
With the purpose of potencialize this teenagers’ voices, we decided to develop a participative audiovisual creation because we believe that a collective creation allows them to take on a proactive and reflexive role through which they can create their own speech.
We establish a work frame that, throughout the creative process, the teenagers can make decisions, allocate tasks, and share responsibilities. Therefore, they will define progressively what they want and what they don’t want to share from everything that comes in these months of teamwork, as well as how it will be and how they will present the audiovisual creations that arise from this project of shared work.
We believe that in first place, the video will be useful as an element of individual and group introspection, which will allow them to explain and defend their own story. As a starting point, we proposed the topic of identity represented through a photography self-portrait. This way, each of them will decide how to define themselves in front
of their teammates. As educators, starting from here allows us to get to know the characteristics of the group, their interests, the concerns they have, the relationship among them, etc.
Later, we decided to get all the self-portraits together, each teen would show his/her photograph, and the rest would comment on what they thought this person wanted to convey with it. With this decision, we wanted the group to reflect on how their image speaks of them and their speech, and to show the feelings or emotions that they transmit to the others, even if a lot of times they are not aware of this.
Our objective is that, through self-portraits, they put in an image their feelings, emotions and thoughts that
they have as teenagers who explore their identities, and the discrimations that they have suffered. We decided to make a collective list. Lastly, we invited them, divided into three small groups, to start thinking what images in motion could represent the different feelings and emotions presented. As a closure, each group chose one of those emotions and expressed it through theatre, and the rest had to guess what it was.
All of this are a series of decisions to create a climate of trust, free self-reflection and collective compromise to connect with all the individualities, and from them, make all our particular and shared needs arise. We consider this interaction between the individual and the collective frames to be the key to address a process of a participative
audiovisual creation that is empowering.
