Following up the first experimental workshop in October 2016, the project continues to evolve around the topic of migration & refugee crises. Under the guiding principle Urban Sreens are our Walls! Digital Calligraffiti is bringing together young representatives of the refugee communities in Berlin, new media artists & calligraffiti artists to create stunning tags with meaningful messages with a series of activities & public events:
Community Building Tour:
A guided tour for young people of the refuge communities to creative spaces and artists’ studios of the city of Berlin. Creating the first impressions
of new artistic formats and discovering individual’s charisma and interest. This would help the participants to develop an active role during the workshop.
Digital Calligraffiti Camp:
A two-days workshop where representatives of the migrating cultures exchange with calligraffiti and urban media artists by investigating the question of sharing values: Where/How is the future that we dreamed of yesterday? What cultural values do people with migration background want to preserve from decaying and to integrate to the way they live today? Which messages do we wish to ‘write beautifully’ and pass on, and which aesthetic forms are at our disposal in a time, where our language is almost exclusively digital.
Networked Live Performance with the Infl3ctor:
The Infl3ctor enables a live visualization of all those ideas and emotions. It is an interactive table – especially designed for Digital Calligraffiti by the media artists Michael Ang and Hamza Abu Ayyash– to project the calligraffiti messages on the urban screens of Berlin and also to distant cities through a networked scenario. In a time where the refugees’ transportation is a burning matter this project opens up new avenues of communication empowering the transportation of thoughts.
Campaigning on Urban Screens:
The activities took place as urban interventions in various venues in Berlin with highlight the metro station Friedrichstraße one of the most central and busy stations in Berlin. The screens of the station were transformed into platforms for sharing the calligraffiti tags produced during the workshop, reaching more than 70.000 passengers by per day for 2 months. The kick off of the campaigning was launched with an Infl3ctor performance in the subway where the usual flow of advertisements was interrupted for 1 hour and artists and participants projected live their messages.
Products – Making a statement
The calligraffiti tags produced during from the sessions above are used for prints on clothes and accessories. At the guided tour for community building the participants learned techniques like 3D laser cutting/printing, co-design etc., and now know how to produce these items themselves. By printing the calligraffiti tags on wearable items the project is aiming at transforming each individual into a message-barer and each item into an artwork with a story.
Digital Calligraffiti Co-Creation session is a community project, that endeavours to contribute to the integration of young people from refugee camps the activities in January 2017 took place in the framework of transmediale / CTM Vorspiel as the 3rd artistic lab of Future DiverCities.