Our kick-off workshop marks a new collaborative endeavour: the Medienwerkstatt Encounters project in partnership with the public library Tempelhof-Schöneberg. Our common vision is to make city libraries central places of encounters, where people with various interests and backgrounds come together and shape an active media-savvy community.
The workshop introduced and offered space for discussing and experimenting with the ways we work: multi-perspective, critical, reflective.
We met on a sunny Saturday afternoon with people from different creative and cultural backgrounds, at the heart of a most welcoming venue – the Theodor Heuss Library. For 5 hours we shared personal experiences, professional skills, visions about the world, and our plans to make it better. Childhood memories, little secrets, smells of home, and sounds of the countryside travelled through the room and took us with them on a creative adventure. We reflected together on questions regarding experiences and obstacles to collaborative work and then paired up in teams to start community-building projects.
Many ideas evolved and spread from the shared knowledge, experience and intentions of the participants. Illustrators, photographers, writers, storytellers, digital experts, anthropologists, filmmakers and teachers designed exciting projects which hold at their core the idea of encounters. At the end of the workshop, each team pitched their project ideas in the form of a flip-chart gallery tour. Here is just a teaser of what we came up with: “talking taboos”, “creative dictionaries”, “illustrated encounters”, “MAD” (Mehr als Deutsch/More than German), “web Kiez series” “musicians in Berlin augmented reality app”, “digital is yet analogue”.
And this is just the beginning. We have planted great seeds. We are looking forward to the summer to turn them into strong and lively plants.
If you want to join any of these projects or to meet the teams, please write to us: contact-english@encounter-blog.com
Photos by Palina Sarokina