The guide for creating and conducting art mediation workshops to tackle gender is now available on our website!

How to empower youngsters in their relationship to gender through art mediation?

Making art is a great process for gender empowerment: it requires self-reflecting on what matters in the construction of identities, expressing emotions and needs, sharing them with a group of people. We invite young people to reflect on how gender affects their life, and to transform their observations according to their desires and imagination. All of this can happen in the creation process of an artistic production – meaning engaging and exploring through body experience and acquiring technical skills. Art mediation has the power to create a climate of confidence to approach sensitive gender-related issues. Thus, we are proposing 5 series of 35 hours long art workshops, where young people are invited to and accompanied in the creation of artworks focusing on the subject of gender.

The art mediation workshops to approach gender-related issues with young people from different social backgrounds have been implemented in different phases based on the artist Werner Moron’s methodology and adapted to the exploration of gender issues.

The manual that we present offers facilitators and participants the opportunity to question gender and limiting identifications of gender and to open up a space for debate, denunciation and questioning of roles, mandates and impositions.

Some of the products we present use techniques already used by social movements that have tried to destabilise unfair processes. The fanzine, proposed by the Complutense University and developed by two of the groups in our strategic alliance, proposes a fresh look that questions established canons. A little further afield, the “Femzine” (feminist fanzine) provokes an openly feminist approach that is critical of patriarchal and extractivist systems.

Following the Werner Moron’s method of “real path-imaginary path” all of the proposals articulate activities that enable the prevention of symptoms related to subalternity, the stigmatisation of collectives and mistreatment, with the fact of how women and other collectives – watch and are being watched. The art activities – collage, photomontage, stencils, cyanotype, video-narratives – start from reality, from messages from the media, magazines, newspapers, photographs of everyday life, and disrupt it: they question it, transgress it. Irony runs at the basis of these proposals that seek to empower and analyse the underlying mechanisms of power, that seek to show and denounce, at the same time analysing the deep roots of inequality.

The book to guide your next art Mediation workshops for Gender Empowerment is now available in English on this page.

The book will soon be available in French, Italian, Slovenian and Spanish!