What we built in 2017 - it’s a wrap
An inspiring, challenging year. We are tired, happy and excited to go on with more awesome projects in 2018. Here is what we did and our wishes for the next year.
Achievements of 2017
We designed two 2-week workshops in France: “Stories We Tell” and “Subjective Mapping”. We started building our home and heaven — Homade. We enriched our community, friends and family with more amazing and inspiring people who came to help over the Summer. Oh, what a year indeed!
Homade!
It was an intense Summer: more than 100 people helped us build and decorate our art space in Brivezac, France! And that’s only people who came to Homade and helped with their own hands… the help from people who gave us material, tips & advice, contacts and emotional support is countless!
Look, here are photos from our building journey over the past several months.
Homade in numbers and meals
Building our Homade was a new, truly inspiring and challenging process. We never did have a place of our own, we never hosted so many volunteers before.. We always knew how amazing our community is, but now we felt it so strongly!
More than 200 helping hands worked to renovate the old stone barn and to build the whole inside facilities — rooms, toilets, showers, kitchen! During the Summer we hosted 8 events (performances and concerts) by amazing and talented artists from the region, all over France and even Spain! Together with our volunteers we enjoyed thousands of swims (no kidding, we made the calculation!) and over 400 meals (cooked by our amazing Marie-Cécile, Anne’s mom; and them as well). We collected more than 25,000 walnuts from our garden and we’re not even counting the cherries, plums, figs & apples!
Nomadways in numbers and creations
Before and after the Homade building time, we managed to squeeze two 2-week artistic and educative workshops. First it was “Stories We Tell” that took place in February-March. Then, “Subjective Mapping” in October. During (and after) those two, together with the inspiring artists who joined them, we created 30 artistic creations: maps, poems, artworks, booklets, videos. Oh, yes, you can see them: here are the creations from our storytelling project and here are the creations of the mapping workshop!
This year we had over 830 applications from people who wanted to join our projects — two new workshops are coming up next year: WeMen and Digitale! For 2017 we focused on designing projects to challenge gender clichés and we are extremely happy that we are now managing to have two upcoming activities that will work exactly on that!
Last but not least, at Nomadways we again worked remotely and digitally a lot — through our online activities we have more than 2,000 new friends on facebook, twitter & instagram and sent 38 newsletters to those who were interested in our new and work. With the help of our team, we shared over 700 photos from our activities and workshops!
This year we hosted participants from several continents once again: Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Croatia, Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Turkey and Russia!
Our trips
As digital nomads and remote workers, we used the opportunity to travel both for work and pleasure, exploring new countries and cultures!
Another map: our trips. This year we worked from and travelled Canada, Portugal, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, Latvia, Turkey, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Cyprus, Poland, Hungary, Lebanon, Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Russia.
Wishes for 2018!
Oh, how we love this part! What better way to start the new year than imagine some awesomeness you can create, design, facilitate and boost! In Warsaw three of us (Alex, Anne and Kika) met to discuss what can we do in 2018 and experimented with blackout poetry to create our wishes for the new year. Then, our Verena joined the game! With a letter from our Miguel, we have several wishes to you (and us):
Kika
In the dawn of the New Year I wish you endless joy in creation, moments of wild inspiration and courage to step on the path of change. In 2018 I especially would like to invite you to get involved in artivism. This ‘strange habit’ combines artistic lightness, creative expression with social transformative potential. It allows to revolutionary steps without destroying sense of humour, togetherness and openheartedness. Let’s be artivists!
Forget the wind and cold outside. Come join us and immerse yourself in stories facing the world today. “Empathy machines”? Become a collective experience. Total immersion.
A strange habit.
Is it safe to continue doing this?
Wish a sense of humor, progressive views and modern knowledge. All this remains nothing more than a drop in a sea of need.
Anne
It’s crazy how creative games reveal what’s within us… Here come my wishes for 2018, for you, for us & for myself! Or in other words… Play, learn, create, share! Open up to learn from yourself, others, your environment. Listen to your body and love it. Take time. Appreciate. Enjoy. Think global, act local. Get political. Get collaborative. Build your & our community.
How to love and
pave the way to community,
Really play.
Building a temporary home,
constructing a story that evokes hope.
Alex (Ål Nik)
December 2017. Three women sitting in a warm and cozy room in Warsaw. Mapping their next year. Hoping many will join them, starting with the next retreat in early 2018 when more team members will join— to design their dream 2018. To be artivists. To inspire. More.
Everyone has the right to believe in a group activism. Possible! Local communities, training, social art, organization. Culture, (where) everyone is represented; lift your spirits & inspire.
Three women working on inspiration. Thanks to empathy, expressive details and humor. 2018.
Verena
In 2018 the adventure will go on. It will be full of surprises, full of creations and even more inspiration. By 1. hard work, 2. fun work, 3. collective work (will turn 1 into 2) and love and laughter, courage and insight. 1000 ideas want to be realised, if you share one with me I’ll tell you mine.
A New History of Collecting and Publishing
when I first started I did so not merely as a hobby, but with objective.
When I began working on, culturally search I was always finding new materials, adding even more allure to creating.
I was quite moved by courage and insight. Only with great ideals and determination, as well as a strong capavility for accomplishing work, can huge projects such as this one be carried forward. Thank you!
Miguel
Though he was not with us this time at our Warswoah retreat, he sends his wishes from the faraway Vietnam in this letter:
If Nomadways was…
If it was five senses, five hundred faces, five thousand souls, fifty thousand applauses and five million clamours. If the times were counted, the days revisited, the poems revolted, the syllables disobedient, the rewards held, the mercy silent, the love imprisoned and the verb just turned into past. If the colours were a reflex, the text nothing but vein words, the gray hairs pretences of nothing, the touch a mirror and the costume a kind of pose. If the secret was a sigh, a woe coming from inside, a look that push the ground out of our feet, the center of a new world. Would all this be true of all that is true, and more what no one says and less what no one silences. Would a rumour, a flash of lucidity, go throw between everything, and as the glimmer of the moon without any fault in its own moonlight, a voice would raise above all others, asking the world to listen to it, asking the world to hear it. I present you our universe made of talks that talk, tales that tell the lives that live. Our lives, the ones that, if all this were true, would made us do it all over again.
We must have strength, we must have courage, we must believe that we are capable, that we have every right to find it and we are capable and we refuse to conform to the state of things! The state of things that emit us, that hurt us, that make us feel less than we would desire, short of what we dream, short of what we want. We walk a thousand miles per hour, let’s wal… let’s walk together.
It is undeniable that life is a layered journey, which develops, establishes and it is many times taken for granted.
We all born naked and the rest is love.
May the odds be ever on your favour. Good luck and don’t fuck it up.
Start your engines and may 2018 be the best year ever.
Forever mine,
Forever thine,
Forever ours.
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.
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