Very often in this blog I have made critical remarks on the employer I am about to leave behind, many of those remarks deserved. However, it is essential to also give praise when it is deserved. Today's Princess Margriet Award for cultural diversity was one of these occasions.
I was highly impressed by Stuart Hall, a British thinker I remember reading during my studies. Hall is one of the leading thinkers in the world when it comes to cultural diversity and very much deserved the award handed to him today. His short address to the crowd was very moving on the relationship of many immigrants to their place of origin as a place that does not offer comfort.
The programme stated that his speech would be commented by the Dutch Minister for European Affairs, Frans Timmermans. He very much impressed me with his clarity, his sophistication and his urge to build societies where the majority feels that newcomers do not threaten their belonging. Timmermans quoted well the old notion that if you build a society focusing on the fear of the barbarian, you end up creating a barbarian society without the barbarians. Valuable warning for the European project. It happens too often that ministers use these kinds of occasions for just arrogantly stating the importance of their own presence.
The event also proved that we can create and we need settings where sophisticated art and insightful thinking actually complement each other and where both are needed for making the argument. Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun and French choreographer Jerome Bel's dance performance Pichet Klunchun & Myself on understanding the essense of different traditions of dance and their relationship to their countries of origin was needed to cristallise Hall's speech on the importance of listening.
Moving, straight to the point and warm. Well done, European Cultural Foundation.
Showing posts with label european cultural foundation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label european cultural foundation. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
The Video Republic
On Monday we launch together with Demos a report on youth and video which has been carried out associated to StrangerFestival. From Monday 6 October the report is available for downloading at www.demos.co.uk. I highly recommend reading it. But here as a taster, a video building up the excitement. The report is funded by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Switch
I was asked to speak to our board tonight with the title: what does Europe mean for young people? This is what I said.
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During my summer holiday I read a great book by a Finnish young philosopher called Tommi Uschanov. The pamphlet by this quite peculiar character is called What is the matter with the Left. In this book that he had apparently been working on for more than six years he wondered why the European left is doing so badly when most of us buy their values of solidarity and compassion nearly to the full. What Uschanov wrote about the Left’s thinking I feel links well to the subject of this intervention. Uschanov claimed that an overall problem of European social democracy has been to tell people that their understanding of themselves and their priorities is wrong and that only if they would understand that they live on false premises, the society would function better. This was very visible in the 1970s idea in the Nordic countries that there is a Social Democrat in all of us.
In my work with young people – once again I wish to stress that I am not part of this group – I meet engaged and worried young people. These people are busy with a million things at the same time on a personal and local scale. The young video makers and fashion designers I meet also seem to be extremely allergic to fake things. If I was asked to describe the generation just shortly, I would dare to state that their jargon tolerance is the lowest of all generations I know. I see people driven by real emotions, real actions and real skills, not by big ideas, great achievements and global movements.
I think this is where it somewhat goes wrong for Europe. When a generation of personal action is coupled with ambitious ideologies, they detach from each other quickly like oil and water. The message being pushed is about big things such as peace and prosperity where people want a role, they want a genuine feeling and they want an emotion. The question I hear is: what should I do with Europe and what does Europe expect me to do? I really don’t have a compelling answer based on the current paradigms.
In the videos I see online on our projects but also on platforms like YouTube, the majority of the videos are not making explicit statements about the state of the world. They are more saying “this is how I think I am feeling today” or “this is what I think matters to me today”. As a research commissioned by the ECF around the StrangerFestival points out, young people use video for deliberation and they very seldom make their work for a specific audience. Video is in most cases a public tool for self exploration.
A superstructure like Europe is not an issue tackled often when it is nothing you can touch, nothing you can strive for and nothing you can influence in your daily practice. Just as an example we can take last year when the European Union celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. The message put forward was 50 years of peace. A lot of references were made also to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the progress Europe have made since then. I could not help wondering what this all should mean for an 18-year-old today who was minus 32 when the treaty of Rome was signed and just about born when the wall was hammered down. 50 years of peace and now what? When Europe seems to be a deteriorating mega project, it is very difficult to get excited.
Coming back to Uschanov, I feel we need a switch in our thinking. Young people are not stupid and don’t buy Europe when you attach a popstar to it. Europe needs to be demystified and it needs to start from people’s realities. What this video culture offers us, is this pool of deliberations for us to dive into. Now what we are mostly doing is asking them to adjust their reality to a supersystem without no practical implications.
So what could be done? I would have two suggestions:
1. Provide access for more young people. If we want to see a Europe that goes to the skin and feels like something, we need to make sure that more people are involved. With this I mean work that we do for instance with theoneminutesjr by providing access to culture, supporting self-esteem to enter the public sphere and in that sense tackling the symbolic inequality in the public sphere created mostly by white heterosexual men. But we need to allow people to decide what matters to them, which brings me to my second point.
2. And this is more difficult: We need to support connections and curation and help people – both young and old – to make sense and find their place. We need to build links between strangers but on matters that matter to them. This does not mean that people need to agree but we need to work towards exposing commonalities in interest. We need to allow people – young and old - to test, modify and attach rather than buy a message about a superproject. When you start from something that matters to the people, you are already more than half way there. And when these millions of expressive people with millions of aspirations happen to be in Lisbon, Pieksämäki and Cluj, I bet there is a feeling of being part of something bigger than our own village. I really think free self-expression is the key: if I matter to Europe, Europe could matter to me.
---
During my summer holiday I read a great book by a Finnish young philosopher called Tommi Uschanov. The pamphlet by this quite peculiar character is called What is the matter with the Left. In this book that he had apparently been working on for more than six years he wondered why the European left is doing so badly when most of us buy their values of solidarity and compassion nearly to the full. What Uschanov wrote about the Left’s thinking I feel links well to the subject of this intervention. Uschanov claimed that an overall problem of European social democracy has been to tell people that their understanding of themselves and their priorities is wrong and that only if they would understand that they live on false premises, the society would function better. This was very visible in the 1970s idea in the Nordic countries that there is a Social Democrat in all of us.
In my work with young people – once again I wish to stress that I am not part of this group – I meet engaged and worried young people. These people are busy with a million things at the same time on a personal and local scale. The young video makers and fashion designers I meet also seem to be extremely allergic to fake things. If I was asked to describe the generation just shortly, I would dare to state that their jargon tolerance is the lowest of all generations I know. I see people driven by real emotions, real actions and real skills, not by big ideas, great achievements and global movements.
I think this is where it somewhat goes wrong for Europe. When a generation of personal action is coupled with ambitious ideologies, they detach from each other quickly like oil and water. The message being pushed is about big things such as peace and prosperity where people want a role, they want a genuine feeling and they want an emotion. The question I hear is: what should I do with Europe and what does Europe expect me to do? I really don’t have a compelling answer based on the current paradigms.
In the videos I see online on our projects but also on platforms like YouTube, the majority of the videos are not making explicit statements about the state of the world. They are more saying “this is how I think I am feeling today” or “this is what I think matters to me today”. As a research commissioned by the ECF around the StrangerFestival points out, young people use video for deliberation and they very seldom make their work for a specific audience. Video is in most cases a public tool for self exploration.
A superstructure like Europe is not an issue tackled often when it is nothing you can touch, nothing you can strive for and nothing you can influence in your daily practice. Just as an example we can take last year when the European Union celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. The message put forward was 50 years of peace. A lot of references were made also to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the progress Europe have made since then. I could not help wondering what this all should mean for an 18-year-old today who was minus 32 when the treaty of Rome was signed and just about born when the wall was hammered down. 50 years of peace and now what? When Europe seems to be a deteriorating mega project, it is very difficult to get excited.
Coming back to Uschanov, I feel we need a switch in our thinking. Young people are not stupid and don’t buy Europe when you attach a popstar to it. Europe needs to be demystified and it needs to start from people’s realities. What this video culture offers us, is this pool of deliberations for us to dive into. Now what we are mostly doing is asking them to adjust their reality to a supersystem without no practical implications.
So what could be done? I would have two suggestions:
1. Provide access for more young people. If we want to see a Europe that goes to the skin and feels like something, we need to make sure that more people are involved. With this I mean work that we do for instance with theoneminutesjr by providing access to culture, supporting self-esteem to enter the public sphere and in that sense tackling the symbolic inequality in the public sphere created mostly by white heterosexual men. But we need to allow people to decide what matters to them, which brings me to my second point.
2. And this is more difficult: We need to support connections and curation and help people – both young and old – to make sense and find their place. We need to build links between strangers but on matters that matter to them. This does not mean that people need to agree but we need to work towards exposing commonalities in interest. We need to allow people – young and old - to test, modify and attach rather than buy a message about a superproject. When you start from something that matters to the people, you are already more than half way there. And when these millions of expressive people with millions of aspirations happen to be in Lisbon, Pieksämäki and Cluj, I bet there is a feeling of being part of something bigger than our own village. I really think free self-expression is the key: if I matter to Europe, Europe could matter to me.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Top of the class
Working with video and youth, you get to see a lot of good stuff. But there are very few videos that would beat Francis Luke Wasser from Dublin and his video 24/7. Have a look. This makes me think of a basic premise of the Demos research we have commissioned around StrangerFestival: these are not expressions of who they are but these cultural expressions are tools for becoming who they will be.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Just the two of us
I had my annual appraisal today at work. It is always a bit nerve-wrecking when you prepare for it. I mean this year at work has been quite challenging so of course there have been some difficult situations. I planned to prepare myself well for the discussion but did not honestly really manage to do it and I think we both went into the discussion quite in a haste.
I must say it was a tremendously good experience. Both my boss and I had a very constructive tone and tried to both be honest and concentrate on solutions and recommendations. I feel both of us had a chance to say things directly and our assessment was quite a lot on the same lines. These weeks are quite horrible at work with all the end-of-the-year stuff so actually the appraisal turned out to be a moment to breathe.
I know a lot of people make fun of the annual evaluation talks with the forms and such but after today I am firmly supporting the obligatory nature of this procedure. It lets both the superior and the employee to get things off their chest and at least in my case it came exactly at the right time. I highly recommend it.
I must say it was a tremendously good experience. Both my boss and I had a very constructive tone and tried to both be honest and concentrate on solutions and recommendations. I feel both of us had a chance to say things directly and our assessment was quite a lot on the same lines. These weeks are quite horrible at work with all the end-of-the-year stuff so actually the appraisal turned out to be a moment to breathe.
I know a lot of people make fun of the annual evaluation talks with the forms and such but after today I am firmly supporting the obligatory nature of this procedure. It lets both the superior and the employee to get things off their chest and at least in my case it came exactly at the right time. I highly recommend it.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Reflections from Prix Europa
Two weeks back I spent a week in Berlin seeing and judging the best of the best when it comes to European television. I wrote a piece for the website of the European Cultural Foundation on the subject.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wider angle
Last Sunday I got back from a working trip - having spent nearly a week watching the best of European television. I still need to watch the winning documentary of Prix Europa, a BBC documentary on alcoholism from Paul Watson. I saw people - top professionals in the TV field - coming out of the screenings with watered eyes. But even without it, I was inspired, shocked and moved.
The best thing I saw at the festival from David Okuefuna's documentary called Racism: A History. Without the need to create a happy ending, Okuefuna showed how brutal and cruel we the whites have been towards blacks in places like Congo, South Africa and the United States. The pictures of lynchings of blacks or of a young black man beaten to death with his face bloated after having spent weeks after his death in the bottom of the river do not leave my mind. I felt guilty for being white and rightly so.
So on Sunday I crashed on my sofa with a pizza delivered to my door and instead of watching the Dutch talent competition for the main role in Evita, I ended up spending two hours watching the CNN documentary God's Warriors on Christian Fundamentalism in the US. Even if in the beginning the subject sounded slightly too heavy, I was glad that I pushed myself through it. Christiane Amanpour's incredibly powerful take on the misuse of religion is part of a three-hour series and a year of work covering fundamentalist Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Best of all, Amanpour's dedicated investigation - as well as Okuefuna's documentary - remind me how there still is a great need for journalism which is not only about speed but also about depth. All these makers were able to show something to me that I did not know. They had spent a year doing these programmes and it shows. They were able to move me and they made me talk about the issues they covered. This is something that a news bulletin or an SMS is never able to do.
The best thing I saw at the festival from David Okuefuna's documentary called Racism: A History. Without the need to create a happy ending, Okuefuna showed how brutal and cruel we the whites have been towards blacks in places like Congo, South Africa and the United States. The pictures of lynchings of blacks or of a young black man beaten to death with his face bloated after having spent weeks after his death in the bottom of the river do not leave my mind. I felt guilty for being white and rightly so.
So on Sunday I crashed on my sofa with a pizza delivered to my door and instead of watching the Dutch talent competition for the main role in Evita, I ended up spending two hours watching the CNN documentary God's Warriors on Christian Fundamentalism in the US. Even if in the beginning the subject sounded slightly too heavy, I was glad that I pushed myself through it. Christiane Amanpour's incredibly powerful take on the misuse of religion is part of a three-hour series and a year of work covering fundamentalist Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Best of all, Amanpour's dedicated investigation - as well as Okuefuna's documentary - remind me how there still is a great need for journalism which is not only about speed but also about depth. All these makers were able to show something to me that I did not know. They had spent a year doing these programmes and it shows. They were able to move me and they made me talk about the issues they covered. This is something that a news bulletin or an SMS is never able to do.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Better dreams
My family comes from an industrial city called Karkkila. My grandfather worked at the factory, my father had a summerjob at the factory and the director of the Högfors steel factory was the most influential person in Karkkila. He kept the schools going, the public saunas warm and the tennis courts (for the upper class) clean.
I had not thought of this for years before yesterday when we visited the Zollverein, an old coal mine and a coking plant in the city of Essen in the West-German Ruhr area. Zollverein - with steel tycoons like the Krupp family - is currently being turned into one of the biggest cultural centres in our entire region as the factories have been closed gradually starting in the 1970s.
The area is massive and beautiful. The symmetric forms and clarity (form follows function) really pleases one's eye. The Ruhr area - with its notorious reputation as the place where you cannot see the blue sky because of the smoke and where you cannot swim in the river - won the bid for the European Capital of Culture in 2010 and is now transforming itself into something new and shiny.
The presentation of their plans was impressive. They plan to close the motorway for a streetparty, they are building islands on the rivers and doing a year-long cultural programme for the area of 54 cities. Their start was already good by snatching the Love Parade away from Berlin. The budget for 2010 activities is around 48 million euros - excluding the recontstruction costs like the ones at Zollverein.
The trip was the ECF's staff day and me and most of my colleagues were positively surprised after nagging on the bus about the destination. Even if Essen still has a long way to go in order to be a creative hub - starting from having at least one bar open in the centre after midnight -, their start is greatly impressive. Zollverein is an example of thinking long-term and big. And some of the elements like the bright orange staircase and escalator by the Dutch star designer Rem Koolhaas are just breathtakingly beautiful.
In 2000 I worked in a project that was part of Helsinki's European City of Culture programme. The best thing in that year was the way it allowed the citizens of Helsinki to love and be proud of their hometown. Helsinki suddenly became exciting, fun and lively.
Karkkila - my family's hometown - was long known as the Finnish city with the greatest debts, one of the heaviest unemployment rates and highest communal taxation. Karkkila still has a long way to go if it wishes to work its way out of this vicious cycle of mass emigration to Helsinki and companies shutting down their production plants.
The Ruhr area is up to similar challenges. one of the successes of the year could be a new dream for the area that has been for years the prime tragic example of the end of industrialisation.
I had not thought of this for years before yesterday when we visited the Zollverein, an old coal mine and a coking plant in the city of Essen in the West-German Ruhr area. Zollverein - with steel tycoons like the Krupp family - is currently being turned into one of the biggest cultural centres in our entire region as the factories have been closed gradually starting in the 1970s.
The area is massive and beautiful. The symmetric forms and clarity (form follows function) really pleases one's eye. The Ruhr area - with its notorious reputation as the place where you cannot see the blue sky because of the smoke and where you cannot swim in the river - won the bid for the European Capital of Culture in 2010 and is now transforming itself into something new and shiny.
The presentation of their plans was impressive. They plan to close the motorway for a streetparty, they are building islands on the rivers and doing a year-long cultural programme for the area of 54 cities. Their start was already good by snatching the Love Parade away from Berlin. The budget for 2010 activities is around 48 million euros - excluding the recontstruction costs like the ones at Zollverein.
The trip was the ECF's staff day and me and most of my colleagues were positively surprised after nagging on the bus about the destination. Even if Essen still has a long way to go in order to be a creative hub - starting from having at least one bar open in the centre after midnight -, their start is greatly impressive. Zollverein is an example of thinking long-term and big. And some of the elements like the bright orange staircase and escalator by the Dutch star designer Rem Koolhaas are just breathtakingly beautiful.
In 2000 I worked in a project that was part of Helsinki's European City of Culture programme. The best thing in that year was the way it allowed the citizens of Helsinki to love and be proud of their hometown. Helsinki suddenly became exciting, fun and lively.
Karkkila - my family's hometown - was long known as the Finnish city with the greatest debts, one of the heaviest unemployment rates and highest communal taxation. Karkkila still has a long way to go if it wishes to work its way out of this vicious cycle of mass emigration to Helsinki and companies shutting down their production plants.
The Ruhr area is up to similar challenges. one of the successes of the year could be a new dream for the area that has been for years the prime tragic example of the end of industrialisation.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
4 kg of innovation
I had a phone call with my sister yesterday morning. As I was telling her about the last push for our EU application, she interrupted me by saying:"I never understood it. I mean that amount of paper. Who is going to read it?"
The piles seen in the picture are the papers we today submitted to the Commission. Our application for funding is 4 kilos and hundreds and hundreds of pages.
It was a weird experience preparing these. Now the plans are set and we just wait for some 4 months for a decision. Although many parts of the application process are quite tiring, it was a good exercise in trying to make sure how a project plan should come together. After i had the final read yesterday, my main feeling was:"This is clear, this is logical and this is exciting."
The piles seen in the picture are the papers we today submitted to the Commission. Our application for funding is 4 kilos and hundreds and hundreds of pages.
It was a weird experience preparing these. Now the plans are set and we just wait for some 4 months for a decision. Although many parts of the application process are quite tiring, it was a good exercise in trying to make sure how a project plan should come together. After i had the final read yesterday, my main feeling was:"This is clear, this is logical and this is exciting."
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Mohammed-in-a-box
I am writing this on Friday afternoon when making my way back to Amsterdam after an inspiring session in Stockholm. Since last year I have been on the Advisory Board for a British Council project called Network Effect which investigates young leadership in Europe and strives for building cross-border collaborations amongst people in Europe who have already shown potential in making things happen.
Today we revised the focus of the future events. The main working method of Network Effect are the conferences bringing together some 35 young professionals from all parts of Europe. We have learned a lot from the previous sessions and realised that the best results are achieved when the event has a tight and provocative focus and the main argument put across is somewhat divisive. The future events will most likely concentrate on Europe’s relationship with its neighbouring regions.
We had good debate on Big Issues such as market logic and on the ways Europe is seen from the outside. Most of us admitted not to be that knowledgeable for instance when it comes to the main views on European Union in Russia. When it comes to Americans we recognised that Europeans are often perceived as self-congratulatory, arrogant and self-obsesssed. Quite often for a good reason if I may add.
In my work I have very often heard remarks that Western Europeans very seldom show genuine interest towards the political and social agenda in countries like Turkey. We tend to come with our themes well prepared – with Eau de Colonial sprayed all over.
The link to my work in the European Cultural Foundation is very clear. One has to remain critical towards one’s own work, the way one builds partnerships and one's approach especially when dealing with issues such as intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity. The risk of boxing people in is constant.
On the plane I read a speech from British diversity intellectual Kenan Malik who I consider to be an interesting and radical thinker when it comes to freedom of speech and multiculturalism. He criticises both multiculturalists and assimilationists for mixing diversity of values and peoples.
He says – rightly so – that multiculturalism creates undemocratic structures where governments ignore their responsibility for connecting directly to all citizens as they address minorities via community leaders. This is the approach which has often been described as the even tribal Take Me To Your Leader strategy. What governments seldom forget to do is check whether the people these organisations say they are representing actually want to be represented by them.
At the same time Malik points out how assimilationists ignore clear cases of racism due to their obsessions with equal treatment. He takes France as the obvious example of this.
”Immigration, in other words, has not caused the fraying of a common set of values”, Malik writes and continues:”Rather multiculturalism is itself a product of such frayed values. Multiculturalism was the official response to the identity crisis within Western societies, as attempt to provide a positive sheen to this crisis, representing the lack of common identity as a new cultural pluralism, and the fragmentation of communities as an enriching kind of diversity.”
All and all, an intellectually stimulating Friday.
Today we revised the focus of the future events. The main working method of Network Effect are the conferences bringing together some 35 young professionals from all parts of Europe. We have learned a lot from the previous sessions and realised that the best results are achieved when the event has a tight and provocative focus and the main argument put across is somewhat divisive. The future events will most likely concentrate on Europe’s relationship with its neighbouring regions.
We had good debate on Big Issues such as market logic and on the ways Europe is seen from the outside. Most of us admitted not to be that knowledgeable for instance when it comes to the main views on European Union in Russia. When it comes to Americans we recognised that Europeans are often perceived as self-congratulatory, arrogant and self-obsesssed. Quite often for a good reason if I may add.
In my work I have very often heard remarks that Western Europeans very seldom show genuine interest towards the political and social agenda in countries like Turkey. We tend to come with our themes well prepared – with Eau de Colonial sprayed all over.
The link to my work in the European Cultural Foundation is very clear. One has to remain critical towards one’s own work, the way one builds partnerships and one's approach especially when dealing with issues such as intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity. The risk of boxing people in is constant.
On the plane I read a speech from British diversity intellectual Kenan Malik who I consider to be an interesting and radical thinker when it comes to freedom of speech and multiculturalism. He criticises both multiculturalists and assimilationists for mixing diversity of values and peoples.
He says – rightly so – that multiculturalism creates undemocratic structures where governments ignore their responsibility for connecting directly to all citizens as they address minorities via community leaders. This is the approach which has often been described as the even tribal Take Me To Your Leader strategy. What governments seldom forget to do is check whether the people these organisations say they are representing actually want to be represented by them.
At the same time Malik points out how assimilationists ignore clear cases of racism due to their obsessions with equal treatment. He takes France as the obvious example of this.
”Immigration, in other words, has not caused the fraying of a common set of values”, Malik writes and continues:”Rather multiculturalism is itself a product of such frayed values. Multiculturalism was the official response to the identity crisis within Western societies, as attempt to provide a positive sheen to this crisis, representing the lack of common identity as a new cultural pluralism, and the fragmentation of communities as an enriching kind of diversity.”
All and all, an intellectually stimulating Friday.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
A few steps to go
A few days to go to the biggest deadline of my professional career so far. On Tuesday we will be handing in an application to the European Commission for a huge European youth project on user-generated content. If they decide to fund us, my plans are set for the following 1,5 years.
It has been quite a struggle putting it all together and we are not there yet but at the same time - and for the first time in my life - I have made plans even to 18 months from now. And above all, thousands of teenagers have chances to do fantastic things with video.
It has been quite scary to realise how good one gets over time in writing application language (no links to journalism) and how much time it takes to build up one of these applications. This would not have been possible without a few excellent and extremely competent colleagues and a network of committed organisations across Europe. So cool to be handling something quite tangible and something this big.
The deadline coincides with another turning point of my life, as in turning 30. But that crisis and interim evaluation will only be done next week. Before that I still have to jump to Stockholm for a meeting tomorrow and hang out with cool people at the Streetlab festival here in Amsterdam.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Up and down with people
One of the best things, or maybe even the best thing, in my work is the people and organisations I get to work with. Having that in mind I can also live through the quarterly budgetings and discussions about work regulations. I get to work with people who are fun and who are 100 % committed to the things they do. That is both inspiring and admirable.
Today I went with our intern to Amsterdam's De Bijlmer district to have a meeting with a wonderful organisation called Imagine IC. They're a cultural centre fully dedicated to working very locally in this neighhbourhood which is by far the most multicultural in Amsterdam. The biggest groups in De Bijlmer are the Surinamese, Antillean and people from Ghana. The ECF has been working with them for years for instance in theoneminutesjr project and now we fund a project called Multiple Islam which uses video as a tool for showing the diverse ways of being a young Muslim - in Europe and beyond. During the next weeks they will also run workshops on building Avatar characters, designing flyers and making videos with local youth.
I like their approach - at the same time as they speak openly about the dangers of walking around De Bijlmer as a young woman at night or about multiculti projects that have gone terribly wrong, they also get all excited about the nearby covered food market which is like a bazaar or the Kwakoe festival taking place in the park every weekend. It's a no bullshit attitude which makes them much more credible and also an approach I would like to see more in the diversity work.
Currently they had an exhibition on Pom, a traditional Surinamese dish and on different ways to prepare it. After the meeting we went to have Pom sandwiches in the nearby cafe. This is why I love Amsterdam - tasty food of a number of varieties is just within reach. Pom is one of tastiest combinations of roots and chicken which I have ever had.
Although I have travelled a lot and done a lot of things, I still value it when someone inspires and guides me into doing something new. I experience these things through the people who help me in discovering them. That is one of the things why I do feel quite privileged.
Today I went with our intern to Amsterdam's De Bijlmer district to have a meeting with a wonderful organisation called Imagine IC. They're a cultural centre fully dedicated to working very locally in this neighhbourhood which is by far the most multicultural in Amsterdam. The biggest groups in De Bijlmer are the Surinamese, Antillean and people from Ghana. The ECF has been working with them for years for instance in theoneminutesjr project and now we fund a project called Multiple Islam which uses video as a tool for showing the diverse ways of being a young Muslim - in Europe and beyond. During the next weeks they will also run workshops on building Avatar characters, designing flyers and making videos with local youth.
I like their approach - at the same time as they speak openly about the dangers of walking around De Bijlmer as a young woman at night or about multiculti projects that have gone terribly wrong, they also get all excited about the nearby covered food market which is like a bazaar or the Kwakoe festival taking place in the park every weekend. It's a no bullshit attitude which makes them much more credible and also an approach I would like to see more in the diversity work.
Currently they had an exhibition on Pom, a traditional Surinamese dish and on different ways to prepare it. After the meeting we went to have Pom sandwiches in the nearby cafe. This is why I love Amsterdam - tasty food of a number of varieties is just within reach. Pom is one of tastiest combinations of roots and chicken which I have ever had.
Although I have travelled a lot and done a lot of things, I still value it when someone inspires and guides me into doing something new. I experience these things through the people who help me in discovering them. That is one of the things why I do feel quite privileged.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Family affairs and other stuff
So a week of work done. Lately I have basically lost the difference between weekends and weekdays due to work-related trips. Tomorrow I am off to Istanbul with a colleague of mine to have a meeting with the public broadcasters that collaborate with us on theoneminutesjr project. Istanbul is my favourite city in the world so I am not complaining.
It has been a relatively good week altogether. I started from London with a visionary discussion on higher education and continued for Tuesday and Wednesday in Helsinki for meetings and a oneminutesjr workshop and on Thursday flew back to Amsterdam.
Our team grew on Thursday as our intern started. She seems great and will definitely help us in daily work as well as in brainstorming.
I think I have written about this before but it does not hurt to say the obvious: I have a great family. I realised it once again when I saw them for two evenings in Helsinki. Apart from being dear to me, they are also humane and good people. Having worked with orphans and people who have lost their families in civil wars, sometimes it is good to remind yourself that these things should not be taken for granted. My homies are fab folks.
My nephew has started walking which is funny to observe. He seems to have a healthy (un-Finnish) self-esteem because he trusts his still slightly wobbly feet a bit too much. You hear a stomp every too minutes but when you turn to see if he hurt himself, he is already on his way to new dangers. Funny dude.
It has been a relatively good week altogether. I started from London with a visionary discussion on higher education and continued for Tuesday and Wednesday in Helsinki for meetings and a oneminutesjr workshop and on Thursday flew back to Amsterdam.
Our team grew on Thursday as our intern started. She seems great and will definitely help us in daily work as well as in brainstorming.
I think I have written about this before but it does not hurt to say the obvious: I have a great family. I realised it once again when I saw them for two evenings in Helsinki. Apart from being dear to me, they are also humane and good people. Having worked with orphans and people who have lost their families in civil wars, sometimes it is good to remind yourself that these things should not be taken for granted. My homies are fab folks.
My nephew has started walking which is funny to observe. He seems to have a healthy (un-Finnish) self-esteem because he trusts his still slightly wobbly feet a bit too much. You hear a stomp every too minutes but when you turn to see if he hurt himself, he is already on his way to new dangers. Funny dude.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Trust me, it's for your own safety
Third day in Casablanca. Or fourth, not exactly sure. I think fourth. Today we had workshops run a peer basis by the participants of the meeting. Really interesting discussion on issues such as:
- social responsibility of editors ("I feel that I do have a responsibility towards my readers and the society to give a broader picture of what women do and can do.")
- editor-contributor relations ("But the bottomline is that if you don't like the way your stuff is edited, you can just write to the web if you wish.")
- advertising ("Our first spread is always journalistic content, not advertisement. That is sort of a strong statement that content comes first.")
Apparently there has been a terrorist attack yesterday in Algeria. As we are in the area with most of the consulates, the fear is quite present. We have had participants ending into problems for photographing (near) the consulates and new barricades appearing every night.
I really feel awkward about this. I mean it is a somewhat twisted sense of security that guns would make unarmed civilians feel safer. i just feel that all these roadblocks and barricades just create more hatred and an uneasy atmosphere.
- social responsibility of editors ("I feel that I do have a responsibility towards my readers and the society to give a broader picture of what women do and can do.")
- editor-contributor relations ("But the bottomline is that if you don't like the way your stuff is edited, you can just write to the web if you wish.")
- advertising ("Our first spread is always journalistic content, not advertisement. That is sort of a strong statement that content comes first.")
Apparently there has been a terrorist attack yesterday in Algeria. As we are in the area with most of the consulates, the fear is quite present. We have had participants ending into problems for photographing (near) the consulates and new barricades appearing every night.
I really feel awkward about this. I mean it is a somewhat twisted sense of security that guns would make unarmed civilians feel safer. i just feel that all these roadblocks and barricades just create more hatred and an uneasy atmosphere.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
We have this problem called diversity
It's been quite a hectic week which can be also seen in the frequency of posts during the last few days. I am currently rather busy with organising a journalistic workshop taking place next week in Morocco and also preparing a big funding application to the European Commission. At times I must confess that I feel more like a juggler than an organiser.
We had a chat at work about our current focus, personal experience of diversity. The ECF is working on a publication showing how we as an organisation address the issue in our work. I have promised to contribute on youth cultures so need to find time for some intellectual work during the next weeks.
The thing I find myself constantly pondering is the concept of community. Especially when working with immigrant groups, the word community is a frequent visitor in the sentences. People wish to address certain communities, get an access to a community and what have you. On a political level this is very much the way multiculturalism is seen, a society consisting of smaller communities.
I find myself running into problems with this notion especially when dealing with youth. I fear often that we impose an identity on people without asking them whether they want it and then we make assumption on what does this identity - as in ethnic or religious background - means to them and their daily life. I know several friends of mine with an immigrant background who have been driven into situations where they are being asked to interpret something that people with the same background are doing, like for instance a Moroccan businessman would by definition have some greater knowledge into the minds of Moroccan teens.
What I would like to see us working on are identities that people choose themselves and working with communities people associate themselves with. On a simple level I could see this working in a way that we see the online gaming community as a relevant community and the visitors of a local mosque as another relevant community (sometimes overlapping) but we do not expect that someone from the gaming community could by definition represent all teenagers owning computer games or that an imam can by definition represent all Muslims in his neigbourhood.
The headline of this post is a sentence I hear very often. The mindset behind it advocates for a simple straight-cut solution that would "take care" of diversity for good. I really detest this approach. With the educational level and access to information most of us, we should be able to do better and accept complexity and mediation as an exciting daily practice.
We had a chat at work about our current focus, personal experience of diversity. The ECF is working on a publication showing how we as an organisation address the issue in our work. I have promised to contribute on youth cultures so need to find time for some intellectual work during the next weeks.
The thing I find myself constantly pondering is the concept of community. Especially when working with immigrant groups, the word community is a frequent visitor in the sentences. People wish to address certain communities, get an access to a community and what have you. On a political level this is very much the way multiculturalism is seen, a society consisting of smaller communities.
I find myself running into problems with this notion especially when dealing with youth. I fear often that we impose an identity on people without asking them whether they want it and then we make assumption on what does this identity - as in ethnic or religious background - means to them and their daily life. I know several friends of mine with an immigrant background who have been driven into situations where they are being asked to interpret something that people with the same background are doing, like for instance a Moroccan businessman would by definition have some greater knowledge into the minds of Moroccan teens.
What I would like to see us working on are identities that people choose themselves and working with communities people associate themselves with. On a simple level I could see this working in a way that we see the online gaming community as a relevant community and the visitors of a local mosque as another relevant community (sometimes overlapping) but we do not expect that someone from the gaming community could by definition represent all teenagers owning computer games or that an imam can by definition represent all Muslims in his neigbourhood.
The headline of this post is a sentence I hear very often. The mindset behind it advocates for a simple straight-cut solution that would "take care" of diversity for good. I really detest this approach. With the educational level and access to information most of us, we should be able to do better and accept complexity and mediation as an exciting daily practice.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Lutheran - To be or not to be?
My new Year's resolution last year was not to kill myself with work. I decided to take more time for myself. I must confess that I have not been too successful with abandoning the protestant work ethics. It has been one exhausting April and May. For weeks and weeks my life has been only full-on work which was starting to show on my face, on my skin and on the quality of delivery. In that sense the 5-day holiday in Barcelona scheduled months back really came at the perfect moment.
One of the best outcomes of this work is a network of wonderful people across Europe. My Europe is really a pool of great people. Partying in the middle of the night at the office of my friends' magazine in Gracia is something you just cannot do as a pure tourist. Having a glass of whiskey in your hand, seeing the cleaners wash the silent square and listening to Daft Punk really makes one forget work.
And like we people of the north every year, I went overboard with the warmth and the sun. One just does not learn. In the first two days I managed to burn my chest on the beach, get a decent blister between my toes from the new flip-flops, barely make my way through a completely random absent-minded work call and party until six in the morning.
Barcelona really is high on my list. I think every city in the world should have quiet cool streets, heavy investments in public art, boutiques instead of supermarkets and decent priced food made from fresh ingredients.
This week my colleague and I are in London for meetings and I continue on Thursday to Switzerland to give a lecture on visual strategies of teenagers. The emails keep flooding in but after the holiday I answer them much more in peace.
One of the best outcomes of this work is a network of wonderful people across Europe. My Europe is really a pool of great people. Partying in the middle of the night at the office of my friends' magazine in Gracia is something you just cannot do as a pure tourist. Having a glass of whiskey in your hand, seeing the cleaners wash the silent square and listening to Daft Punk really makes one forget work.
And like we people of the north every year, I went overboard with the warmth and the sun. One just does not learn. In the first two days I managed to burn my chest on the beach, get a decent blister between my toes from the new flip-flops, barely make my way through a completely random absent-minded work call and party until six in the morning.
Barcelona really is high on my list. I think every city in the world should have quiet cool streets, heavy investments in public art, boutiques instead of supermarkets and decent priced food made from fresh ingredients.
This week my colleague and I are in London for meetings and I continue on Thursday to Switzerland to give a lecture on visual strategies of teenagers. The emails keep flooding in but after the holiday I answer them much more in peace.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Wonderful as itself
I am once again in Istanbul. The governing bodies of my employer are meeting here which is why I was also flown in to present plans for the coming years. I could not be more excited as I have really fallen in love with this city and its people during the last 1,5 years. This time the stay is more or less three days which is wonderful. In a minute I should head out to have dinner with my great Turkish friends.
By coincidence I watched yesterday a reportage my good friend made for the Finnish TV on Istanbul last September when we both took part in a pop culture journalism workshop here. I could not be more proud of how she grasped the city through interviews with two young Istanbullers.
In the interviews they say wonderful things that I think should be shared and commented:
"We don't wake up every morning thinking about the European Union."
- this country is magnificent as itself and filled with people who strive for freedom and equality. The EU accession prospect might have speeded up some things but the modernisation agenda comes from within.
"I have friends all over the world but the Turkish friendships are somehow deeper."
- the way people get close with you here is something even I have not experienced elsewhere. It's real and sincere from the first moment on. And people take the time to share and to listen.
By coincidence I watched yesterday a reportage my good friend made for the Finnish TV on Istanbul last September when we both took part in a pop culture journalism workshop here. I could not be more proud of how she grasped the city through interviews with two young Istanbullers.
In the interviews they say wonderful things that I think should be shared and commented:
"We don't wake up every morning thinking about the European Union."
- this country is magnificent as itself and filled with people who strive for freedom and equality. The EU accession prospect might have speeded up some things but the modernisation agenda comes from within.
"I have friends all over the world but the Turkish friendships are somehow deeper."
- the way people get close with you here is something even I have not experienced elsewhere. It's real and sincere from the first moment on. And people take the time to share and to listen.
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