Visualitation: community building and engagement with visual art
We explored various ways to use visual language for a better understanding of local communities and communication with them
As part of our project ‘Visualitation’ we designed two workshops that dived in the endless universe of the visual language: one in France with focus on the basics of visual facilitation; and one in Italy which explored community building and engagement visual tools. We created the project to empower youth workers, educators and young people with more ways to express, using the universal language of the images.
The context
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 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 graphic facilitation — an emerging visual communication tool that demonstrates excellent results in non-formal education. And beyond.
Basics in visual facilitation
During our workshop in Burlats, France, we explored the basics of the method — the visual alphabet and how simple drawing can be applied to visualising all sorts of information and ideas. This workshop gave time and space to our participants to learn the basics but also experiment and draw as much as needed in order to become more fluent with the visual language. For this introduction, our facilitators Ilaria Fresa and Bruno Morera designed a highly interactive programme that focused also on the process of listening and understanding before drawing — a crucial step in the process of using the method.
How to engage communities with visual art?
With our workshop in Schiavi di Abruzzo, Italy, we focused on finding a well-working model for community engagement using the visual language. The training was intensive and highly interactive: our participants mainly focused on interacting with the local community and finding how to connect with people. The process was challenging — language barriers (only a small part of the group was speaking Italian), safety measures because of the covid-19 pandemic, difference in understanding. But they not only found a way — they created a memorable experience for everyone in Schiavi di Abruzzo!
Visualitation Model for community building and engagement
Our process was experimental, but thoughtful and empathetic to the local community. Thanks to our experienced facilitators, Silvia Alba and Alexandra Nikolova, we redesigned our programme a few times in order to meet everyone’s needs and expectations. Here are the steps of the process we applied in only 10 days — a process that usually takes months or at least a few weeks to complete.
1.Getting to know each other and collective values agreement
Of course, before meeting the community, the group of artivists, educators or whoever, need to spend some time getting aligned and feeling already as a team. As this process could take a short moment or lasts for ages, it’s good to facilitate it in a way that people can meet as a whole group, small groups and individually; and have various exercises to try working together and get a sense of others’ skills and work style. A proper introduction of the local community specifics is also important: before going to the community, to know their story, situation, challenges, specifics and whatever relevant. Remember that the most important thing is the communication and avoiding miscommunication — listen carefully and actively first, open up and be vocal about anything that bothers you and make sure you are expressing yourself in a nonviolent way.
2.Meet the community
In order to meet the local community as a group, we have designed a pop-up event. We invited people to join us at one of the main squares and facilitated a few activities in small groups.
A collective and interactive fresco collected their perceptions of Schiavi di Abruzzo — what if the town was a colour, or an animal, or food? The gathered data was later used for the final outputs, including creating a local new character that was based on the local inhabitants favourite food, a special type of pasta.
A music circle made people relax and sign along with several musicians from our group. Another group was drawing portraits of the humans of Schiavi di Abruzzo and was talking to them, already gathering some of their stories.
We also facilitated several visits to some local artists and businesses — we visited the local beekeepers Francesco and Lorenzo and a sculptor.
3.Collect stories
During the whole week, the artivists were present in the village to meet the locals, talk to them by visiting the public spaces, local restaurants and favouring parks. The process of interviewing the community doesn’t have to be formal at all — talking to people over a nice meal and drink is always much more bonding, so just spend some time with them, try their delicious meals and listen to their beautiful songs.
4.Visualise the stories
Once we got enough stories from the community, we started working on ways to put them together in a visual way. We did that is smaller groups — there were 3 mural groups (we had 3 walls to draw), an event group (who facilitated an engaging treasure hunt for the final event) and an online communication group (who made sure we had everything published and recordered online).
5.Involve the community
The most important element of the whole model is involving the community. Everyone in the village were looking forward to us starting the draw the murals, so they can join us — that’s something that can be started even earlier than what we did! While the team designs the murals compositions before, it is quite easy to involve people in drawing: you just need to created the outline and then you can invite them to help you paint. And maybe even add some small new elements!
Drawing murals
One of the key activities was the creation of the 3 murals. Each of them was designed by a different small group of artivists and they involved anyone from the village who was interested to join the drawing.
Pezzatina
The online communication group came up with a new character introduced to the community. In fact, the locals loved Pezzatina so much, that they asked us to draw her on their walls all the time! You can follow her adventures on Instagram here.
Treasure hunt
The final event was also quite special, thanks to our event group: there was a fun treasure hunt for Pezzatina around Schiavi di Abruzzo facilitated by the artivists and many local children joined it with huge excitement.
6. Local Municipality support
If you are going to interact with a local community, make sure you have the support of the Mayor and the Municipality before you start. Go to them and present what you are planning to do, involve them and get their feedback. They can help you with so many things — by giving you space to work, to finance some parts of the project, point you to the right people and support your communication efforts. We are grateful to the Municipality of Schiavi di Abruzzo for their amazing support!
About Nomadways
We craft international workshops for artists, educators and youth workers. Together we create pedagogical artwork, share and invent practical solutions to social problems.
- If you are interested in our work, subscribe to our monthly news. Or follow us on facebook, twitter and instagram.
- Join our community of artivists here.
- Visit our website nomadways.org
_
This project 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.
