‘Tell me your story!’ – Making the ‘Other’ Visible through the Development of Collaborative Visual Narratives

Abstract

This article reports on the findings of a series of participatory video art/documentary workshops designed and implemented to enhance understanding and collaboration between teenagers of diverse cultural backgrounds in the city of Pafos in the Republic of Cyprus. This research initiative was part of The Alien Trail (2017); a photographic project that explored the everyday life of refugees and migrants currently living in the island through the images of four distinguished photographers: Antoine D’Agata, Nikos Economopoulos, Bieke Depoorter and Nicolas Iordanou (Project Creator). The workshops were co‐designed by artists, educators and anthropologists in order to promote visual and multimodal communication amongst participants through short video and documentary making and collaborative drawing sessions. The findings of this practice highlight that teenagers were able to develop empathy and understanding by discussing and sharing meaning through exploring each other’s visual narratives.

‘Is This Really Europe?’ Migration, Social Practice and the Performance of Global Citizenship

“…Nevertheless, ethically sensitive approaches to using art forms like photography to tell the stories of migrants in Mediterranean contexts and elsewhere may help to enact some sense of ‘citizenship’ through the actual process of art‐making (O'Neill 2017; Markidou 2019). The remaining part of this article will describe and analyse the use of various data collection strategies and artistic media in a socially engaged workshop in Malta.…”