Our client
World Cultures Museum (WCM) in Gothenburg wanted to utilize Rosetta Arts long-term experience of working on the ground with marginalised groups, which WCM had limited success in reaching to date.
This formed part of a creative collaboration between the World Culture Museum and Rosetta Arts in the framework of the Tandem Europe programme.
By sharing our innovative Mindful Arts programme, we hoped to improve well-being of WCM’s target groups in Sweden, which received the largest number of refugees per capita in 2015, and particularly in Gothenburg, one of the most segregated city’s in Europe.
The challenges WCM faced:
- Social and cultural gaps due to segregation
- Lack of ability to reach specific target groups
Themes:
- Use arts to enhance well-being of our target groups
- Raising voices of minority groups
Cooperation
We wanted to embed the learning from WCM’s experience in digital storytelling and facilitating a network for intercultural dialogue, with people from diverse backgrounds to learn across differences and initiate the circumstance for positive change.
Furthermore, we wanted to stretch the learnings gleaned from the project, to see how the methods could be transferred and utilised in other settings. With this in mind, we devised an adjunct project that connected the World Cultures Museum to our Young Makers cohort of young people in London.
Our approach
We exchanged learning and understanding of native and migrants cultures in our partner communities, in order to co-create shared solutions to common challenges.
Intercultural dialogue through arts plays an important role to integrate newcomers by bridging gaps and improving mutual understanding with the native communities.
Today, local communities in Europe have fewer opportunities to meet individuals from other culturally-diverse communities, since the society is not structured to enable interaction across cultures, disciplines or generations. We want to learn and test how mindfulness, visual arts, structured networking and storytelling can facilitate dialogue and integration.
Project Outcomes
Since 2017 we have visited Malmo and Gothenburg delivering a series of Mindful Art workshops to social entrepreneurs at the STPLN centre to staff from the World Culture Museum and Department of Culture for the City of Gothenburg, as well as voluntary sector and cultural leaders in Gothenburg hosted at Tilt. The workshops were designed to meet the following objectives:
- An introduction to mindfulness, focused on how participants could improve their own well-being and become familiarised with mindfulness and its benefits.
- An introduction to Rosetta Mindful Arts programme, so participants could see how a programme combining both arts and health can diversify audiences by providing an entirely new pathway to engaging visitors/participants by appealing to a range of different value systems.
- To present Rosetta Arts’ work, emphasising they ways we work with and engage diverse people, young and old, from socially disadvantaged areas and an introduction to our ecosystem
- To develop the programme to be run recursively which allows for feedback on this method of working enabling it to be adapted to new environments. We have initiated an ever developing blueprint for WSM and Rosetta to use digital storytelling and mindful arts practice methodologies collaboratively and within their own work as organisations.
- Young Makers at Rosetta Arts participated in a workshop entitled On Civil Courage and Ethics, run by Rasha Shaaban, Project Manager at National Museum of World Culture in Sweden. The workshop further developed their research on the theme of Heroes: Real and Imagined, which focussed on exploring those values practiced by heroes who inspire our Young Makers. Read more here.
- Participants also took part in 4 specially designed Mindful Art tasters to try first hand some of the activities that form a small part of our Rosetta Mindful Arts programme. Attendees were encouraged to experience the possibilities that this way of working can be applied to both themselves and their role in the museums by encouraging them to take part in participatory visual art activities, centred around mindfulness and art.
