Topic 1 How Stories are Made
Eoin de Bhairduin (2020) Why the Moon Travels. Skein Press.
Exercise:
- What are the stories that you tell about yourself?
- What stories is your life caught up in, despite itself?
- What stories do others (strangers) tell about people like you?
- What stories are part of your tradition and heritage?
- What stories are never heard?
- What stories would you like to hear?
- What other story would you like to tell about your life, your world, your communities?
Task: Together using storycircle #1 approach, write a story of who you are as a group. You might also choose to make statements. “I am/We are..”.
The aim of intercultural education is to shift from a focus on identity understood as ‘identical’ to identities involving reciprocal exchange and encounter. It focuses on relationships and challenges ideas of fixed and essential identity. To be alive is to move, to exchange and to change. Museum collections and galleries often offer collections that reveal how ideas, material, rituals, beliefs, and things move. But so too can cities, fashion, everyday rituals. Here we invite reflection on movement and journeys in different ways to ‘normalise’ movement and exchange, The questions aim to prompt a shift in sensibility toward movement, difference and exchange as foundational rather than the idea of ‘identity’ as sameness and fixed. Given fears of movements, exchange, and migration, it aims to open up the conversation indirectly about these issues.
First: Reflect on ideas that no longer have traction (fashion?) but also how ideas, maps, materials, motifs, technologies and aesthetic practices circulated the globe, for example, printing from Japan to the Gutenberg Bible to the internet.
Exercise 1: Take an everyday object, idea or technology and trace its genesis and journey, the objects with which it is affiliated now, and those with which it was once connected (perhaps a pair of sneakers).
Exercise 2: Create a mind map/universe map showcasing what is important to the group taking all young people into account and allowing everyone to have a voice.
Exercise 3: Go for a walk in your local area and look carefully at the physical environment: where do the flowers come from, the motifs on buildings, the metals that gleam? Become curious, an explorer of the world. Find different ways of mapping the environment (sound, video, rubbings, found objects..). See Otobong Nkanga’s artwork in this regard and Studio Chronotope http://www.studiochronotope.com/projects.html