Photo: © 2017, Peace Dialogue, “Art and Visualization in Peacebuilding”. Author: Armine Zakaryan.
From April 19 to 23, 2017 the implementing team (the staff of Peace Dialogue and project’s German partner OWEN) of the project “Arena: Community Theatre and public art” organized and implemented workshop “Art and visualization in community peacebuilding processes”. 21 participants from Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Russian Federation participated in the workshop.
As in the previous two years, the program this year will continue to support the civic activists and independent artists of the involved parties to develop their abilities and contribute to overcoming the isolation of civic activists working in peacebuilding in their communities.
The Arena project is aimed at improving the impact of peace building on the community and regional levels through developing relevant pro-active strategies for a community based peace building and creating a safe and supportive network for civil society groups from the South Caucasus Region, Russian Federation and Ukraine.
The network will promote the cooperation of civil activists and independent artists in order to create a platform for dialogue through art between different segments of the conflict involved societies.
The workshop “Art and visualization in community peacebuilding processes” was the first event of the project’s second year (2017). The aim of the workshop was to understand what peacebuilding means to each of the participants, as well as find out, through a joint work, which particular visual tools are effective and how these tools can be used in the activities conducted with conflict affected groups, based on current social and political peculiarities of the participants’ respected countries.
During the workshop the participants were given skills for organizing peacbuilding activities in their respective communities with the use of visual materials (comics, posters, films, cartoons). They were introduced to analytical tools and theoretic materials about conflict transformation by peaceful means, which are the most appropriate to use for various sectors of societies that are in different stages of conflict, including in the process aimed at shaping dialogue between the decision-makers.
The staff of the Arena project believes that art is the best way to raise ideas in the conflict affected societies and voice important issues such as human rights violations, militarization, propaganda, social injustice, etc.
It should be noted that the follow up activity in the framework project ARENA: Community Theatre and Public Art will be the strategic planning of the international network Arena which will take place in August 2017 at Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR) in Stadtschlaining, which is a unique peace center in Europe.
We would like also to recommend you reading the article about another workshop “Systematizing the experiences of ARENA project” held in the framework of the ARENA project from 24 to 27 April, 2017 in Tbilisi.
For more details, please contact Armine Zakaryan at [email protected]
The Project’s German Partner – OWEN – Mobile Akademie für Geschlechterdemokratie und Friedensförderung e.V.
The project “Arena: Community Theater and Public Art” is supported by the zivik (Civil Conflict Resolution) programme of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) with means from the German Federal Foreign Office.
