Creative Participation Projects

Participatory techniques for artistic creative processes have always been part of my way of working. My studies in art education, which I completed in 2019, encouraged me to explore the potential of combining collaborative, educational and artistic work and to develop specific methods of actively involving my protagonists in the filmmaking or art-making process to tell their stories from their own perspective and with their own creative ideas.

My aim is to make the participants’ driving force, motivation, and vision to realise a film project together visible to the viewer directly in the film. In this way, I consciously use the documentation of the process of creation and the joint work as an element in the emerging film or art project.

After a one-year period of living in Madagascar and during my studies in art education, I founded the intercultural multimedia programme MIO and the association Mio e.V. in 2014 with the aim of initiating creative participation projects for children and young people. In 2014-15, I realised a pilot programme for intercultural learning in schools with my project partner Delphine Bishop through a video exchange project of a German and Malagasy school class. From 2015 to 2016, I also worked on the multimedia exhibition "Batang Lumad" by and with refugee "Lumad" children of an indigenous tribe from the south of the Philippines with the Filipino artist Aba Dalena. The children involved created sculptures, paintings, their own photographs and film footage in workshops that tell of their displacement. In 2017, I started the workshop and documentary film project "Fonja" in a Malagasy youth prison where I had previously volunteered. In the approximately 3-month film workshop and 2-month editing workshop, the juvenile prisoners learned how to handle the camera and, afterwards, the editing programme, and took over the direction and organisation of their filming shortly after the introduction. The finished film "Fonja" tells in an experimental way about the everyday life of the youths, which the viewer gets to know from the perspective of the detainees and their own footage.

"Fonja" has won several awards, including the Best Word Documentary Award in Jihlava (IDFF), the Up & Coming prize in Vienna (Human World), the Cinegate Prize in Cologne (IFFC) and the prize for the Best Documentary in Berlin (Sehsüchte ISFF).