How to give voice to the refugees and the disadvantaged communities?
Can art and culture feed active citizenship and favor social inclusion?
VOICES is a new artistic collaboration that explores and celebrates freedom, providing a voice for those who go unheard.
Particularly, the project contemplates to:
- enable artists from different European countries to work together to coordinate cohesive joined-up performance making visible the voices of refugees and asylum seekers and encourage integration;
- involve refugees, migrants and other disadvantaged communities in each partner location in the creation and delivery of a celebratory cultural event highlighting themes of arrival and welcome;
- use digital technologies to enhance and widen engagement with arts and culture and to facilitate new and rich ways of enabling audience participation and involvement.
The art will be to the center of all the activities that VOICES will put in practice:
- Four new commissions of site specific outdoor theatre created in UK, Germany, Italy and Romania, and presented together in each partner country. ArtReach has committed the UK commission to Parrabbola, who will be creating Wheeze – The Wind of Change with UK performances in London (July 2018) and Leicester (26 August 2018).
- Four processional performance events created and delivered in Palermo, Hamburg, London and Leicester. The events will involve hundreds of local people and newly arrived refugees and asylum seekers in each location, creating a colourful parade, based on the theme of Welcome.
The two elements of the project will maximise engagement of audiences by being performed free in public spaces.
VOICES will be presented in the spring to autumn 2018 at Explora Museum, Rome on 22 April. In Palermo, VOICES will be presented in July 2018.
David Hill, Director of ArtReach said
“VOICES is a further development of our inspiring European partnership work, exploring new artistic collaboration and with a strong element of audience development including the integration of refugees and asylum seekers.”
UK cultural development agency ArtReach is leading this ambitious partnership of European organisations to deliver the EU Creative Europe funded Voices of Solidarity (VOICES) project.
Partners with ArtReach are the major street arts festival altonale (Hamburg, Germany), children’s museum Explora (Rome, Italy), community development agency CESIE (Palermo, Italy) and international theatre and Festival organisation Teatrul National Radu Stanca (Sibiu,Romania).
Stay tuned and if you need further information please contact Daria La Barbera, daria.labarbera@cesie.org
