workshop by Stalker/ON (IT)

this workshop is free, max 10 participants
June 26th – 28th – please register!

Refugees’ status is suspended in between acceptation and refuse, feeling of welcoming or rejected. Refugees’ gaze on our cities can tell us a lot, not just on them but more on us, on the state of our public sphere. Refugees’ every day life is shifting, in just one generation, in between the becoming familiar of the hosting land and the becoming imaginary of the land of birth.
At the crossing of those two perceptions, we want to propose the “Sound like home?” three days workshop with refugees, artists and anyone who is interested and a final public walk. The goal is to make visible and accessible the psychological and cultural gap experienced by refugees inhabiting European cities, and how this is becoming one of the most interesting and underrated emerging cultural visions of Europe, that should help us understanding how our cities are changing.
Stalker will lead a participatory workshop giving to the partecipants the tools and strategies that employ direct unedited forms of cooperative documentation to raise a better self-awareness of their community and of their environment; stressing the idea that participation in the walks is an active way to experience the city. Whilst on the walk you are not passive being led by a guide but you become an essential element of the walk and an active participant in debates about the city underlining the cooperation of its users to generate collective values.
Following the practice of reciprocal learning, the strategies to approach the territory will be defined together with the partecipants at the beginning of the workshop giving to everyone the autonomy to build paths and program; key elements will be casual encounters and spontenous chances of possibility and opportunity which will be the contents of the final narration of the public walk.
The preparatory workshop seeks to collectively explore the ongoing social and urban transformation of the urban space in the city of Brussels, facing and debating together the key words that are defining the today metropolitan areas, urban/rural, us/others, past/future, citizens/institution.

The workshop will be mainly on field.
The workshop will be mainly in English and French.
The workshop is open to refugees and anyone interested in facing refugees issues, experiencing
the proposed practice of crossing and debating on key words about the city of Brussels.