Dare to love who you want to love and not who you are supposed to love!
In the summer of 2015 we gave a particular turn to the work of Educommunication. After having participated in a training of theCandela Association to involve the gender perspective in our projects and, at the same time, the idea of making a participatory video arose in Sant Andreu de Palomar, where the group of young people decided to explain in a short fiction the stereotypes we have about love.
Without a doubt it was a fantastic opportunity to develop for the first time everything we had worked on in the workshops with our colleagues of Candela. That’s how it came about Atreveix-te, an initiative of the FEDAC Schools to make participatory video with seven young people from the neighborhood who signed up for the Artistic Summer Camp that year.
Natàlia R. Martí, journalist and educommunicator of elParlante was the coordinator of the project and explains that, although before starting the camp the participating group was presented with different social themes, the group chose love relationships and their stereotypes. Said and done!
The time frame was quite limited: they had a week to outline the story, the characters, write the script, cast, rehearse and record. In this sense, Natàlia acknowledges that the first session was key to the success of the project: “we saw audiovisual pieces from which debates about love relationships and imposed heteronormativity emerged. Based on these premises, we worked on the script.” Through media criticism, emotions and personal stories emerge. She recalls that “they felt very identified and identified with the subject ofgender expression“
It was about explaining crossovers of feelings of the same group and talking about the issue from two different perspectives: sexual preference and gender expression. The idea of the video was decided, only the profiles of the characters and the stereotypes that would mark history.
“The group decided to deal with the different ideas of hegemonic masculinity what they exist and how they could dismantle these concepts”, explains Natàlia. For this reason, the group chose that the protagonist was a boy. The rest was very fast: a casting, a couple of days of filming and even a theatrical presentation gala. Natàlia insists that with such a compact, determined working group that has participated since the moment of the definition of the project it is very easy to work. We don’t want to tell you more details, we want you to see it!