Declaration of Universal Human Rights, From Human – to Human is the translated title of the public intervention that took part in different places within the bilingual city of Bolzano in South Tyrol, North Italy.
The public intervention was commissioned by and designed in collaboration with two employees of the Public office for permanent education of the city Bolzano.
The intervention’s main goal is to make people engage with each other so that they would declare each other the Universal Rights through a passport for which they had to portrait the other (unknown) person, sign, and stamp the document like during an official declaration.
Thereby we wanted to make people more aware of the already existing Universal Rights declared in 1948. Furthermore we targeted the individuals as responsible actors to question the current situation and conditions regarding the implementation of human rights. (e.g. within the refugee discourse and the connected issue of equality)
In addition the commissioning public servants had to change their usual roles they embody while working for the city-office. They no longer acted in a mode of ‘state employee ↔ citizen’ but became rather moderators/agents that try to make single individuals engage with each other on the streets. (‘citizen ↔ citizen’)
Besides that, people could invent and dream about new universal rights that they would like to see implemented and write them down on a huge black board – the “mirror of critique and hopes”.
Can Genk’s economy shift from a centric and top-down industrial model of labour to a network of bottom-up local enterprises? And can strengthening the local economy in Genk’s neighbourhoods achieve greater economic resilience in the town’s future? How can data collection and analysis support this shift? Continue reading “Genk’s economic shift: from mining coal to mining data” →
On Thursday, April 16th the Office for Public Play organised the first “Readers, Write!” workshop session with the master students of Child Culture Design (HDK School of Design and Crafts) within Tobias Engberg’s text seminar series.
Readers, Write! is a method and toolkit, designed to facilitate arts and design researchers working with academic texts for artistic research. Further on, it aims to stimulate reflection by means of writing.
After the briefing, the class was divided into smaller groups. Inspired by the Wiener Kaffeehaus culture the groups each searched for their most comfortable place to work, read and discuss. The Viennese coffee houses offered its social members the opportunity to read and discussed the latest news facts over a cup of coffee. Some student groups worked in the library, the cafeteria or went outside the school building; another group worked in the classroom. The probe, referring to a newspaper and its “letter to the editor” guided the student groups into various of methods that helped them processing the academic text — from reading/understanding to forming their own opinion about the text. At a later stage, the group re-united to share and discuss the different opinions on the text. The final group discussion was closed by a short evaluation.
