Concept and Activities
Concept
In the last few years, the youth in Stip and generally in most Balkan countries, are facing lack of contacts and real collaboration, limited opportunities for non-formal education and serious youth problems such as: high degree of high school drop outs, teenage pregnancy, criminal acts and corruption, drug and alcohol abuse, use of weapons and big degree of unemployment.
Furthermore, the national and local governments don't have a strategy for inclusion of these target groups in policy decision making process, which can provide significant change. Intrigued by these situations, the OPEN DOOR introduced art as a medium for social inclusion of youth as active creators of the local cultural/youth policies. Stip is a small urban environment that is facing financially terminated social and cultural institutions, and abandoned or neglected youth, social and cultural spaces. Furthermore, these institutions have limited financial support because local state budget is extremely low and local private companies have low economical power and low interest in investing in youth projects. In addition to this, is really important to underline the current political clime in Macedonia, in which the whole country is undergoing the process of decentralization. There is a general need for strengthening the connections between Stip citizens and local youth policy makers, with an aim to make this communication more sustainable and to enable them to make a positive contribution to their local community. The small cities need support in the process of decentralization of culture and help around building organizational capacity of the local institutions. In that sense, the project set up a positive example that can be used as a model for progress and further regional collaboration.
We built a meeting point for the Local Government representatives from all involved parties, regional NGO’s and the project participants, where they could reflect on, identify and strategically solve the youth policy problems that they face within Balkan turbulent transitional environment. As organizer, PAC Multimedia believes that with investment in mutual, regional cultural and youth policy, the region can successfully meet the EU integration process demands.
The main aim of OPEN DOOR is to promote international youth work as an extra tool for inclusion of young people into society. This project promotes active and organized participation of Balkan youth in the building of the regional youth and cultural policy. This platform encourages the youth in urban environments to take personal responsibility for the social life in their own cities and to solve problems that concern them. OPEN DOOR is a place for dialogue among communities across the region, enabling people to see social issues and their impact through art. The focus of the seminar is using artistic methods in order to reach youth on the edge of society, and to serve as a medium for sharing stories across physical and ideological borders.
OPEN DOOR is a one-week intensive, educative and creative project that addresses relevant issues of the local communities in Stip.
This project unites young people from different cultural, ethnical and religious backgrounds (Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Greece and Macedonia) that from 25.06.2006 till 03.07.2006 will communicate and articulate art in open public spaces in Stip: House of Youth, City Square, The bank of river Otinje...
It incoroporates three different artistic programs: performing programme called ID(ifferent), video program called ID of paper and music program called Sound ID.
The programs are designed with specific working approach that uses art as a tool for successful and harmless detection of the community problems.
Activities
- Phase 1 : Preparational Meeting, Skopje, 13-14 May 2006
Report of the preparational meeting
- Phase 2 : Art Training Camp, Stip, 25 June - 3 July 2006
Music Programme: "Sound ID"
The aim of the music part of the programme is group work and learning a different aspect of art as a social tool through creative involvement of the participants in producing improvised “instruments” – accessible to all, in the creation of collective sound performance with the community of Stip.
Performance programme
How to approach to the city in order to comprise private and public space, so the possible suppositions and suggestions about personal and social identities are created anew?
Key words in work are:
antagonism
hybridisation
contamination
The main interest of the program is in transformational processes of urban environment and demographic movements, their causes and consequences in our society and treatise on those issues in contemporary performing arts.
Methodology of the work is based on relationship between social sedimentation and antagonistic re-activations in the public domain.
In the moment of antagonism accumulated notions/ ideas, beliefs and “knowledge/ realisations” of ours become dislocated/ broken into layers – split!
Transformation of the public space into something else through performing/ action, through confrontation of different identities, could bring up the following questions:
What kind of “urgency” can incite an individual or a community to action today?
Which elements of our own identities do we recognize (in the moment of “conflict in the public domain”)?
Is it possible to remain unchanged (in terms of identity) after the “conflict” and how should new processes (of transformation) be articulated?
Could new contents be produced in reality, but without multiplying those that already exist?
How new contents in reality could become a part of everyday life and/ or heritage of ours, and is it at all possible that they are consumed by general public?
How should one intervene in the public space/ public domain – be subversive but not violent?
How can we re-activate suppressed/ absent/ forgotten meanings and contents so that in this way new constellations, new meanings, new contents are created in the society/ public.
Such actions imply certain risk in terms of success, but that is just where the importance and exceptionality of the action lie – to acquire an identity in the very moment of its execution.
- Phase 3 : Follow-Up Activities
Report for the EYF