European Training Ι non-formal Education , artistic practices Ι Novembre 2016 Ι Marchiennes
The Art for the Future Training Course took place from the 15th to the 23th of October and was about non formal education through visual arts. The program included discussion about professional experiences and artistic workshops: photography, graphical art and video.
Based on a theme, the mobility, the participants had to use visual arts to talk about it.
But what is the point of this training ? In fact, participants came from differents places in Europe. They were 28 Youth workers, volunteers, Youngsters … from Romania, Latvia, France, Italy, Greece, Spain & Slovenia. They all had a different ages, came from different backgrounds, etc. Then, it became interesting, how should we work together with so many different persons that speak different languages ?
To start, the two first days we played some games to introduce ourselves and to know each others a little more. And this worked very well.
About the language barrier, almost everybody spoke english, with exceptions but we always succeed in understanding each other using another language, patient translators, hands and smiles…
How workshops took place ?
As already mentionned, there were three workshops (half day) for three days. The participants could choose quickly in which workshops they wanted to be.
The workshops explanations were made a day before with the rest of the week program in order to give a chance to everyone, to discover every technics.
In video, photography and visual art, three professional trainers led their own workshops. As experts, they taught the participants the technics and process used during the workshops. And they collectively created photo, video, draws… Whether it was technics about green screen, stop-motion, light graph, pinhold or imaginary maps everythings was explained to allow participants to used what they learned, back in their homeland.
But the real strength of the group didn’t took place during the workshops also. Indeed, the mealtimes allowed people to get closer outside work hours. Some events also happened at the end of the evening. One was called the french night and the other one was called intercultural exchanges where the participants could taste traditionnal products from differents countries. And indeed some, others evenst happened but were less formal.
All of these events led some people to oversleep and led to some romances (proof that integration worked very well).
After three days of workshops, we organized an exhibition, the ultimate achievement of all this work.
We had to think about the way to design the youth hostel where we were living, in an exhibition place. Some rooms were totally changed, some less but in general all the living space was set in a special way.
The exhibition took place – and I won’t say anything about the number of visitors who saw it in order to avoid decreasing the prestige of all the project – and we received good critics.
Proud of a hard but interesting work and after a week spend together, we discussed about what we expected during this training, our fears and the best moments we had together. In general everything was fine, some people cried (real men don’t cry!) because we knew that the training was almost over.
The last evening was nice even if shorter than the previous one due to the early bus on Sunday morning to go back to Lille.
So on the morning in Lille, some took the train, others the bus to go back home. For sure, saying goodbye was memorable (again some people cried but I won’t make any comments about it otherwise people will call me horrible person).
Anyway, if someone asked me to participate to another kind of this experience, definitly I would say yes.
Hugo Triffault, civic service
