Come2Art artists visit Brussels
Last week Culture Action Europe hosted a 5-day training for the project #Come2Art. The workshop trained 15 artists and cultural workers to engage as creativity ambassadors of the co-creativity hubs, and as community mentors. The project partners, ActionAid Hellas (Greece), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Clube Intercultural (Portugal), Creativity Platform (Greece) and IoDeposito (Italy), and MeltingPro (Italy) also joined and delivered the training in Brussels.
The Come2Art Project, which will run until early 2023, focuses on providing life skills, such as emotional self-regulation, communication and critical thinking, to artists and cultural workers who will then transfer this expertise to their local communities. The project aims at enhancing the collaborative work on creative placemaking projects in order to foster these life skills and resilience in fellow community members, especially within communities that are still coping with the precarity brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the course of the visit, the cohort of artists and cultural workers engaged in full-day presentations, workshops and discussions that increased their knowledge about community resilience and creative placemaking, as well as leadership skills. One of the main goals of this training was to create a European working group of trained artists and cultural workers who will be able to work on enhancing community resilience and life skills development through arts and creative placemaking.
In the beginning parts of the training, the group worked to understand the common challenges faced by artists and cultural workers due to COVID-19, as well as opportunities to explore new audiences and promote their work in new ways. The project partners then introduced the training modules for the artists, presenting key training areas, such as “Creativity in practice: methods and tools for collective artistic expression,” “Digital tools for creative expression,” and “Arts in time of crisis: a way to self-regulate emotions.”
Later in the training, artists were provided with practical case studies and tools to better envision how their practice will position them as community educators and creativity ambassadors. Through hands-on workshops and participatory activities, the artists were provided with in-depth information about how to use creative placemaking as a tool for creating resilient communities and exploring artistic approaches to the social role of artists as ladders in sustaining creative engagement at the community level.
The group also had the opportunity to deepen their learning around best practices in community engagement by speaking directly with Bram Dewolfs from Urban Foxes (Brussels). The group had the opportunity to ask practical questions about engagement, motivation, sustainability, funding and risk-taking surrounding their upcoming work engaging their own communities.
Later in the project, after the artists and cultural workers have met and trained the Come2Art community members in their respective countries, three creative placemaking projects will be delivered: one in Thessaloniki (Greece), one in Treviso (Italy), and one in Lisbon (Portugal). These creative placemaking projects will engage the wider public by seeking their input and contributions to the implementation of the projects. Projects will be displayed in public and will be enjoyed by anyone in the community, which will further promote civic engagement and volunteering, foster transferable life skills, and empower and influence personal and community well-being.
To stay updated on the upcoming activities and events of the #Come2Art project, follow along on social media and check out the Come2Art website.
