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Alternative Botschaften

2023-1-DE04-KA152-YOU-0001416952023Mobility of young peopleongoing
Countries: DE|BY|PL|GE · Grant: €21,065
Promotion of alternative forms of participationReception and integration of refugees and migrantsCreativity, arts and culture

Objectives

Background: The horizon of all meetings between the German-Belarusian organization KAJA in recent decades has always been a concrete external demand to set up social-humanitarian aid projects using art/design/architecture, or in this case, to support Belarusian and Ukrainian activists in their creative resistance. And so, young people from the program countries Poland and Germany were also expected to take on a responsible and challenging real-life task: to participate in solidarity actions against dictatorship and war in Eastern Europe and to develop personal resilience through collaborative art actions. In keeping with the project title "Alternative Messages," the meeting framework, the ALTERNATIVE EMBASSY OF FREE AND DEMOCRATIC BELARUS (ALT BOT), as a physical place of identification and project station, was extended through various artistic formats to send signals against hybrid warfare, the war of words and images. Protest, resistance, and revolt require physical spaces for gathering and identification here and now, for the development of creative resistance formats with the potential to serve as a memorial site in the future. This outward-looking impulse toward Eastern Europe was contrasted by the meeting with the immediate neighborhood of Weissensee Ost. In collaboration with new local partners, it was possible to contribute to expanding the diversity of cultural activities by adding a European dimension of encounter and to enhancing the value of the public space opened up to young people. Objectives: 1. Young people were given space, including for compensation: relief from and persecution in Belarus and everyday life during the war. Depressing experiences of the struggle for survival / the so far futile struggle against the Putin-Lukashenko alliance. Satisfying the interest of socially and politically engaged young people/students in non-profit, impact-oriented projects that focus on direct contact, personal meetings, and collaboration with those affected, as well as concrete, visible results. 2. Experience of one's own potential and/or limitations in political-artistic value discourses and actions: freedom of artistic expression, as it is realized – certainly associated with personal existential risks – against threats, boundaries, censorship, and self-sensation. 3. Development of shared values such as freedom (of art and personal self-efficacy), tolerance (specifically: towards political/cultural attitudes and preferences, as well as the artistic expression of other participants). 4. Opening a temporary project space for the participation of local children/young people in the development of sustainable urban projects.

Project partners (4)