VISUALITATION . 2021 . ITALY & FRANCE
IN A NUTSHELL
Our project Visualitation had two workshops in France and Italy. They focused on ways to empower educators and youth workers with the method of visual facilitation; and with the method of using art for community building and engagement.
Visualitation for community building - Italy
⊛ Dates: 2-13 August 2021
⊛ Location: Schiavi di Abruzzo (Italy)
⊛ Who: we worked with 28 youth leaders and workers, activists, educators, storytellers, visual thinkers & doers, writers and visual artists – all kinds of artivists! who were interested in (better) visual language!
⊛ Where from: France, Germany, Italy, Romania, Greece, the United Kingdom and Spain
⊛ The project was co-funded by Erasmus+ Programme: food and accommodation were fully covered.
_
Visualitation for artivists - France
⊛ Dates: 2-13 September 2021
⊛ Location: Burlats (France)
⊛ Who: we had 28 youth leaders and workers, activists, educators, storytellers, visual thinkers & doers, writers and visual artists – all kinds of artivists! who are interested in (better) visual language!
⊛ Where from: France, Germany, Italy, Romania, Greece, the United Kingdom and Spain
⊛ The project was co-funded by Erasmus+ Programme: food and accommodation are covered.
TEAM
ILARIA FRESA
coordinator and facilitator
Ilaria is a visual facilitator engaged to spread the use of visual language as a tool to support the learning processes. Her mission is to help people to explore their full potential and support groups to develop projects and focus on the implementation. As a social researcher who graduated in Political Science with a Master of Art in communication and sociology of Migration, she conducted a number of researches concerning gender and refugees’ empowerment - focused on financial education and family balance and savings - within European projects.
SILVIA ALBA
facilitator
Raised in Colombia, Silvia is a Designer/Linguist by trade and has spent the last 9 years telling visual stories and helping people communicate around the world. Whether it is helping the United Nations illustrate messages for Families in countries currently facing war or graphic recording Elon Musk as he announced his plan to take Humans to Mars by 2024, she is constantly looking for ways in which visual imagery can connect people and break language and culture barriers.
More recently, she set up her own non for profit organisation The City is our Playground in order to tackle the integration of marginalised communities in the city via creative projects such as participatory mural painting.
ÅL NIK (ALEXANDRA NIKOLOVA)
coordinator and facilitator
Alex has been working with illustration, visual communication, graphic design and digital communication for the last 14 years. She is a non-formal education trainer since 2014 when she started teaching about digital skills and all creative ways to do online marketing and business planning. Whilst working on Erasmus+ trainings, she also became quite excited to design and write such projects.
Alex is a graduate of two bachelors: “History of Art” and “Art Education Theory and Practice” in the National Art Academy in Sofia and explores the possibilities of using art as an educational tool as well as an effective tool for communication, inclusion and self-development.
HÉLÈNE CAVAIGNAC
coordinator
Our Hélène is a pedagogic artivist ! Indeed, for many years she worked as Project Coordinator in NGOs involved in the non-formal education workshops and she has been a non formal education free-lance trainer for 5 years. Passionate about the performing arts (pantomime, clown, masks, impro, costume), she uses it as tools to develop critical thought to lead to empowerment.
The exploration of new ways of learning is her keystone, she has developed original training courses based on self-directed training and learning experiences. Her involvement in European mobility programs for fifteen years led her to join the Nomadways team. She also works in the professional training field, where she gives sociology courses to social and youth workers.
BRUNO MORERA
facilitator
Musician, Clown, Street Performer, Acrobat, Bruno has a huge experience in itinerancy and nomadism. He has toured for almost 10 years with nomad companies. He works clown for individuals and improvisation for groups in all three practical levels: directing performing and coaching. He participated in the research-action of Ser’p’art in the field of collective improvisation in the public space
and worked on this topic with many directors (Loco Brusca, Jango Edwards, John Melville, Jef Johnson, Juan Carlos Muñoz...). In his interest for the physical body on stage, he also trained contemporary dance butoh, acro yoga, standing acrobatics, Thai massage and vegetarian cooking.
Visualitation 1, Italy - drawing murals with the community of Schiavi di Abruzzo. Photo by Bogdan Grigore.
Photo by Lotte (Charlotte Gröbel)
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Creating and maintaining a good quality of clear and valuable communication is a challenging activity for the communities, non-profit organisations and youth workers worldwide. Youth leaders, trainers and facilitators often struggle to deliver their instructions in an easy to understand way to groups of young people with a different cultural and social background. Happily, to the rescue comes the rich world of visual communication which empowers us with a huge amount of tools we can apply in our life and work. With our project, we aimed at empowering artivists with the method of visual facilitation - an emerging visual communication tool that demonstrates excellent results in non-formal education.
Visual facilitation strengthens communication on many levels. The message we would like to spread resonates much more deeply with audiences, it enables co-creation and increases energy in meetings immersively. Visuals are universal, easy to understand from people coming from different social backgrounds and help participants to overcome language barriers.
Using visuals helps any facilitator to explain themselves and clearly convey messages. Science also gives more contributions in this case: 30% of our brain cortex processes visual information, and 75% of our sensory neurons are actually visual neurons. In fact, seeing visual content is faster and easier to process than written text, which is important in any trainings, meetings and educational activities.
Therefore, we brought together youth leaders, educators and visual practitioners to develop, test and pass on a set of empowering tools coming straight from the world of visual language. Our training courses were based on experiential learning. Our participants went through the process of meeting and getting to know the other participants, being introduced to the project and its goals.
During our workshop in France, they learned the “grammar” of visual facilitation and had the chance to dive into many drawing exercises, to feel comfortable in doing more visual content with their hands. They were introduced to lettering, the importance of metaphor, context and templates in facilitating a whole training course with visual content.
They also had time to experiment and exercise the new learning, to create their visual dictionaries and finally design and experiment on the field how to create community connection through visual practices.
During our workshop in Italy, the participants were put into a highly interactive environment with the local community of Schiavi di Abruzzo. They collected stories from the inhabitants of the village and designed murals to depict them. Together with the local community, we created murals and a treasure hunt of the newly born local heroine - Pezzatina.
Photo by Bogdan Grigore.
Visualitation 2 - our group at the training course in France
Visualitation 2 - our group at the training course in France
This training course has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme. If you would like to find out more about the programme, please visit European Commission’s webpage here.
