Resilient Visual Tales — Italy

Resilient Visual Tales was a training course, where 20 people from 8 different countries were learning how to use participatory photography as a tool of working with refugees. 

 

We would like to thank the organisers Marika and Deborah for organising this course with so many useful activities. 

 

There were not so many team building and get to know each other activities, which was actually very good because we devoted almost all the time to the really important things. Everything was to the point. 

 

The location was in Grigno, so we were observing the beauty of the Italian mountains every day. It was nice and peaceful place for learning new things. 

 

During first two days we researched participary photography methods and the language of photography. We also had an active debates about the differences of social migration and being a refugee and how exactly participatory photography can help both groups. 

 

At the third day we created a social event, where we made an actual workshops with local associations and refugees, who are living in Italy with the aim to share their resilient visual tales. We had three groups, Welcome team, Participatory Photography and Participatory Video team. I was a part of the last one and Jan, my partner from the Czech group, was in the Welcome team. 

 

We made a participatory video and photo workshop with Ukrainian kids from Razom organisation. 

We also had a very emotional interview with two Ukrainian women, who escaped Russian occupation in Irpin and Bucha, places where Russian army committed mass murder of civilian Ukrainian people. The workshop showed us how important it is for the people, who survived at war to speak about their traumatic experience and also how we can use the participatory photography methods to show their story. 

 

Next days we had more workshops focused on working with refugees like PTSD grounding techniques and recognition of trauma and later we had a general evaluation of the project.

 

The course showed us not only how photography and video can be an inclusion tools to show resilient life stories, but also to be more understanding towards people who were forced to leave their homes because foremost we are all humans with stories, dreams and hopes. 

 

As a non-formal education course it was not only about learning, but also sharing and making new friends while working together in teams and spending the time with each others between and after the activities. 

 

I admire the people with whom I was in the Video team: Ricardo, Giacomo, Wenceslao, Marta and Mehmed. They are incredible, creative and very inspiring. I very much hope to see them again once. 

 

And the last but not the least we would like to say a big thank you for all the members of EYCB organisation, who made our participation on the course happened. You are doing an invaluable work!