The workshop entitled “The uses of anger” (led by Serena Dankwa and Bettina Aremu) focused on individual experiences as the subject and/or object of “change” and “racialization”: How do I make the Other into a stranger? How am I made into a stranger? Serena Dankwa and Bettina Aremu read passages from a text by Toni Morrison whilst walking in a darkened room, illuminated only by balls of light. As the predominant primacy of the sense of sight was largely cancelled, the setting enabled the experience of shifting one’s own attention to hearing. The text addresses the challenging, sometimes painful fact that white socialization in a predominantly white society means being woven into racist structures and reproducing them. The narrator recounts an everyday episode that can be read as a concrete example of the process of “changing”. Although fiction, the story offered many opportunities to build bridges to one’s own experience. In small groups, the participants then thought about situations in which they themselves had turned others into strangers or had been “changed” themselves. At the end of the workshop, the invitation to become sensitive to the co-presence of others in the room was combined with a process of immerging in a text: Sentences from Toni Morrison’s essay were read out loud to the group by the participants as they strolled through the room.

In the workshop entitled “Diversity in Movement”, dancer and choreographer Jo Parkes from Berlin invited the participants to encounter each other in co-creative processes of bodywork inspired by dance theatre. In her role as contemporary dancer, Jo Parkes has created a dance theatre with people of all ages, with a focus on young refugees. She developed a trauma-sensitive approach to co-creativity in context of “Mobile Dance”. The participants first met in pairs without touching each other in different variations of mirrored movement sequences in which either participant could take the lead. Subsequently, the encounters become more physical and simple dance patterns were created in an exploratory way following short choreographic instructions. Step by step, the participants developed a physical empathy nourished and inspired by the mirrored other. Moving in all these settings without words challenged the initial (socially trained) reluctance to let a body take the lead, allowing the discovery of the inherent potential for embodied conversations which allows inclusion of all whose language skills might be diminished.

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^{Workshop “Diversity in motion” with Jo Parkes (Photos: © Timo Ullmann)}

The setting consisted of large sized cards which could be composed into carpet like shapes, aiming at bringing people from different backgrounds together.

Myriam Rambach, co-founder of the French collective “Diffusion – une forme de la rencontre”, presented the art education project “Tapis Volant” and then invited participants to explore and play along. In a co-creative process involving people with migration experience, 500 cards in more than 60 languages were created. The cards serve as a game system and as a starting point for conversations between people of different age groups and languages. The cards were used in workshops with activists from the movement “sans papier”, schoolchildren, in “Cafés des Parents” organised by schools and in youth and migration centres, and were also made visible as art actions in public spaces.

Myriam Rambach provided a selection of these cards, which she spread out on the floor and on tables as colourful carpets. By uncovering the cards, participants were able to piece together stories from sentence fragments, invent new stories themselves and reflect on the inclusion and exclusion that occurs when differing languages get interwoven. They also discussed the consequences of their own language ignorance when dealing with pupils.

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