RECITS or Network of Cinematographic Exploration and Information for Social Transformation has reunited over the next 2 years, five European organisations in a common approach of sharing, research, experimentation and innovation around the question of audiovisual narratives. These 5 associations are actors in the fields of community and voluntary audiovisual media, production, audiovisual broadcasting and circulation, adult education. To conceive stories and their production processes as vectors of transformation, to elaborate methods in order to reinforce and boost people and groups of people in fragile social and economic situations, to share tools so as to facilitate the learning of audiovisual methods of communication and self-representation, to develop innovatory methods for the criticism of audiovisual content, to experiment with new aesthetic and narrative forms so as to share imaginary worlds; these are going to be the shared work areas of this European partnership composed of : CàmeresiAcció from Barcelona, SMK Videofactory from Bologna, les CEMEA Pays de la Loire from Nantes, Zin TV from Brussels, and Primitivi from Marseilles. Thanks to a cooperation work facilitated with 4 trans-national meetings, our partnership wants to share tools and pedagogic methodology that each organization could propose to its target audience : its staff, its peers (audiovisual educators of local communities) and adult learners whom our organizations usually work with. Those exchanges will also permit to organize 5 training sessions and be able to enhance the knowledge and skills of our educational teams (between 15 and 20 educators). The training sessions will deal with ressources from adult education to liberating of audiovisual representation (C1), creative processes of a participatory documentary (C2), cinematographic journalism as an instrument of knowledge development (C3), narrative exploration as a way to develop enthusiastic and critical imaginaries of learners (C4), tools and practices for the distribution of multimedia objects (C5). 5 public events (public screenings and debates, conferences and workshops, outdoor performances) will also be organized to share and put into practice the ideas and lessons of our project with the inhabitants, the passionates, associative actors, and involved people on each territory of our partnership (between 150 and 250 direct participants in total). A large audience (about 5000 of people) will be informed of the project and made aware of our productions (training programs, videos objects) thanks to publics events organized through the project and the communication produced for the project (flyers, publications on social medias and partner's websites). But the final beneficiaries of the project are people faced with social, economic and health difficulties, people whom our organizations generally work with. These people are often part of social or cultural groups who are very badly or little represented in the mass media (inhabitants of working-class districts, people in situations of migration, people who suffer from discrimination; linked to their culture race or gender, people who are disabled physically or psychologically). The ultimate objective of RECITS is to improve the practices of educators to turn the production of audiovisual narratives and self-representation into the means of social transformation through more intercultural dialogue, equality and social justice.
The ultimate goal of RECITS was to improve the practices of educators in the development of new audiovisual narratives and in the transmission of these narratives. This was done in a collective and self-representative way in order to initiate social and intercultural transformation and to encourage critical thinking. To do this, we first identified and shared the values common to our five organizations, in order to define a transnational work field, interests and objectives, and then, in a second step, we put into practice, through the experimentation of the approaches specific to each of the structures, these pedagogical experiences, favoring the acquisition of new skills for our educators. These moments of sharing allowed us to improve the training offer of each of our structures to the public: what we wished to obtain during the implementation of the project.
In 2020, when we began to meet to start the two-year project RÉCITS, all the countries of the world, one after the other, were forced to confine themselves, the only way to stop the progression of the coronavirus epidemic. This unprecedented international event revealed in a tangible way the complexity of the international relations and their inter-connection, political decisions taken at the other end of the globe being able to influence the daily life of each one. Once again, resignation was presented as the only realistic position in the face of a nebulous, almost incomprehensible present, which rekindled, through social networks, a distrust of the traditional media, whose lack of independence was becoming glaring. Thus, at the beginning of the year 2020, the meeting of our five self-media collectives, claiming the production of subjective information, more connected to the people and/or realized by them, took then all its sense: to imagine collectively, through exchanges of audiovisual practices and educational approaches, other visions of the world, in order to invent the world of tomorrow, to try to go out of the dead end.