The resources
- Intellectual Output #1 – Exploring “Gender”, “Power” and “Empowerment”
- Intellectual Output #2 – Museum workshops on gender representations
- Intellectual Output #3 – Art Mediation workshops for Gender Empowerment
- Intellectual Output #4 – Dialogues about power dynamics and gender within the art world
- Intellectual Output #5 – Art-campaigns and toolkit for gender empowerment
- Intellectual Output #6 -Playbook for youth workers
Intellectual Output #1
Exploring “Gender”, “Power” and "Empowerment"
This IO is the theoretical background of the whole project in which we explored how young people live, interpret, approach gender in order to understand how they see the connection of gender and power issues. More specifically, this IO helped us to identify areas where youngsters may “need” empowerment which will open in the following IOs. How to understand and what is empowerment in the professional world for youngsters? How power and gender are related in the professional world? How gender interfere in social interactions? Where do young people feel they face discrimination because of their gender?
Aims:
- identify and explore with young people key concepts and key elements in the debate about gender today;
- work with power issues and identify young people capabilities and power games to speak out on gender issues;
- elaborate (art-based) tools to trigger debate in a coherent, safe and constructive way for trainers, youth workers and young people
- devise entertaining forms of learning concepts and definitions.
Primary target group: youngsters (between 18 and 30) stemming from very different backgrounds, from privileged and underprivileged environment, from gender minorities and of heterosexual identity.
Secondary target group: youth workers, facilitators, trainers working with the primary target group.
Intellectual Output #2
Museum workshops on gender representations
Each of the partners made a 6 hours workshop with young people using artworks inviting participants to discuss questions related to gender, power and empowerment. Each partner has created a museum itinerary for thematic tours around the main subject of the project. The participants of these workshops were asked to build and record audio podcasts, where they share personal testimonies around the subject of their itinerary, based on works of art and the exchanges they had with the other participants of their group during the museum visit. These recordings can be listened to at any time: either in the museums and in front of the artworks in question, or in the classroom or in front of the computer. At the same time, they are offered as an active methodology for questioning the interpretation of the past.
The itineraries developed are:
- Presentism and Uchrony – UCM/EARTDI – National Archaeological Museum, Madrid, Spain
- Public Space and Gender Roles – DADAU – Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
- Female versus Male Gaze – MOH – Pinacoteca “Corrado Giaquinto”, Bari, Italy
- Sex Related Power-Relations – City of Women – Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Interculturality and Gender – ELAN – Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
We would like to thank all the young participants who contributed to the different workshops that took place in Paris, Ljubljana, Bari and Madrid. Without them, these materials would not exist.
Aims:
- Develop ways to trigger dialogue around the works of art and create an art interaction in order to strengthen and bring out the representations around gender and its artistic expression and develop the capacity for action of each one
- Giving youth workers arts-based skills and tools to work on gender and power
- Invent ways to use cultural mediation (encounter, dialogue with art works) as a means to tackle specific challenges connected to gender and power
Intellectual Output #3
Art Mediation workshops for Gender Empowerment
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.
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.
For this IO, the French partner, Élan Interculturel, produced 4 videos to make the conduction of the art mediation workshops easier. Watch them here below!
Intellectual Output #4
Dialogues about power dynamics and gender within the art world
Who needs empowerment? For this intellectual output, each partner invited a guest from the art industry to talk about power dynamics and gender within the art world.
If we wish to act on representations, redistributions and recognition (Fraser, N., 1995) of sex and gender within the arts, it is essential to question the structures that produce, legitimize and give financial and symbolic value to certain works of art rather than others. Strong inequalities persist within the professional art world. If one compares the 65% of female art students and their significant low representation in the market/institutions later (Samuel Belfond, 2018) thereafter, one wonders what are the mechanisms of marginalisation when young artists entering the professional art world. In order to support the youth within the arts, we would like to bring them together in a cycle of discussions around these issues, and support them in preparing for their professional future.
IO4 consists of a series of 4 events in each country aiming to gather young actors and professionals of the art system to discuss the current professional power dynamics and the connection with gender within the art world in order to take stock of the current situation and study possible solutions. We then made 6 videos of these dialogues. One for each partner and one that summarizes all the different talks.
Below is the video summary of all the dialogues
And here all the video interviews of each partner
Camille Lesbros by De l'art et d'autre
María Gimeno by EARTDI/Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
Špela Čadež by City of Women
Ivana Pia Lorusso & Margherita Ragno by MOH
Nour by Élan Interculturel
Intellectual Output #5
Art-campaigns and toolkit for gender empowerment
The format of the campaigns has been co-developed by the groups with the input of professionals, such as artists, communicators. The campaigns have responded to local needs and specific contexts of participating countries, therefore they have taken the form of interventions in public space, painted murals, on-line action, etc. The accompanying toolkit will contain the 5 “recipes” for executing these campaign events.
Aims:
- create a dynamic and innovative process involving youth, youth workers and artists to exchange knowledge and strategies to build an effective art-campaign with gender equality agency;
- empower youth to talk and create multi-media artworks about gender that can communicate to wider public;
- raise awareness on the topic among youth, youth workers and the public;
- equip youth workers / youth leaders with the skills necessary to conceive, prepare and co-lead art campaigns and awareness building programs on gender equality and gender diversity;
- address and reach a wider public via off and online- actions and raise visibility of the overall project;
- build a replicable model for art-campaign making, embedded in specific pedagogical objectives to be easily transferable to different contexts (cultural institutions, schools, informal learning initiatives, NGO’s, youth centres, etc);
- enable international exchange among the participants and allow multicultural perspectives on the topic.
Discover the videos of the art campaign interventions realised in France, Italy, Slovenia and Spain
Queering Beehives by City of Women (Slovenia)
Ironic Road Bans to reclaim our city by MOH (Italy)
On the thread of gender by Élan Interculturel (France)
Violence or tradition? by EARTDI/
Mail art campaign by De l’art et d’autre (France)
Intellectual Output #6
Playbook for youth workers
IO6 consisted of a 15-hour training course for youth workers and a playbook combining the previous project outputs (IO 1, 2, 3, 5) and adapted to the reality of the daily professional life of youth workers.
From our needs analysis, we observed that youth workers are in need for:
- getting more knowledge about gender concepts;
- trainings on how to share concepts around gender in order to better support and accompany the youth;
- innovative and art mediation tools to create dialogue with young people and to manage conflicts;
- a reflection on gender and power expression within their institution to ensure greater equality within youth support teams and organisations.
For these reasons and more we developed the toolkit, composed of the following chapters:
- “But…Hey! What is gender?” Intro to main concepts
- “What if I have a conflict about gender?” Gender and Interculturality
- “Hmm… how to look at art?” Museum visit
- “How do I use artmaking to reflect on gender?” Artistic mediation
In each chapter, you will find a theoretical part to give you a bit of foundation regarding the subject addressed in the question and a series of activities in link with the notion. Take this book as suggestions: all exercises are open to interpretation.
