Tihomir, about the project:
Our project " Integration and Understanding through Literacy and Art " was born from the social changes that are constantly happening in our societies. Constant migrations are affecting our communities all the time, not only in the focus of recent refugee crises, but also in the sense of different kinds of constant migration of youth, middle age people, and older people - despite if the reasons and motivations for that are individual or collective. Experiences from integration are various and depend from affected group‘s motivation to build more aware, open, colourful society - to the moment when lone people are facing discrimination and marginalization based on xenophobic issues in their new living surrounding.
That is the main reason for choosing Jerusalem, Israel to be the venue for this project's implementation and experiencing the diversities. During the project, through personal engagement of participants, we had experienced multiculturalism of the active societies which are coexisting together. To achieve that, we used non-formal methodologies, specifically combined Micro non-fiction writing technique and artistic approach of which are giving us Comics. |
In this way, two different artistic skills were connected through short stories and comics based on participants experiences.
Fostering intercultural communication made all attendees participate creatively, learn non-formally about communication across different cultures and social groups, and see how culture affects integration. It has helped participants to face the issues that normally appear within an organized social context that is made up of individuals from a different religious, social, ethnic and educational background. It has also shown how culture determinates, how individuals encode messages, what medium they choose for transmitting it and in which way messages are interpreted. Aside from language, in the group, intercultural communication focuses on social attributes, thought patterns and the cultures of different groups of people. It also involves the understanding of different cultures, languages and customs. At the end of the project final exhibition and presentation at the host country was presented. |