Four years of AtWork and a new website where you can now access and enjoy new interactive contents. Starting from today you can explore stories, relations, faces, pages, traces, colors, lights and shadows of more than 200 notebooks from the artists and young creative talents collected in 4 years of encounters, international exhibitions, workshops and journeys.
Dakar, Abidjan, Kampala, Cairo, Modena have been the key chapters of this journey that started in 2012 at the intersection of art, creativity, geography and education.
It gave birth to a new world map, where the borders, instead of being the unsurmountable walls, became a space of a special encounter.
Together with Simon Njami, our partner, advisor, prominent curator and an indispensable journey companion, we have started AtWork, moved by the desire to contribute to creating a new generation of pan-African thinkers able to participate actively in building their own present.
We have created the space where a community was born, a community that continues to grow, where the young people from different cultures, together, face their contradictions, challenges, conflicts, posing questions and finding solutions, constantly evolving their attitudes, personalities and artistic practices.
Instead of imposing a certain form of knowledge acquisition, AtWork provides the participants with a toolbox that they can use to construct and deconstruct the reality that surrounds them, transforming them into the architects of the future “at work”.
Putting the human, personal and experiential aspect at its core AtWork aims first and foremost to stimulate the critical thinking among the participants.
AtWork is a way to think and approach the reality, that is expressed in a process that has three key moments: the workshop, the exhibition and the community. The process that every time touches a different context with a different topic.
At the end of each workshop each participant personalizes a Moleskine notebook, which fixes the process of self-reflection and collective discussion in an art piece.
The notebooks are thus the living testimony of the innovative creative process potential and become part of lettera27’s artist notebooks collection, where the artworks of the established artists live next to the students’ pieces, reflecting AtWork horizontal and anti-hierarchical approach.
In these four years, we have created material and immaterial spaces, where the debate and the exchange between the curators, artists and students allowed to create an international artistic network that found its home in AtWork community. Co-creation, sustainability and replicability of the experience and the cross-disciplinary approach become the key elements of this ever- growing community that is transforming into an interactive and living organism.
The new AtWork website that we are presenting you today reflects the experiences of 10 workshops, 196 students, 385 on-line community members from 30 countries. All of which in 3 languages.
For the first time it will be possible to leaf through all the notebooks produced by the students during the last four years and the ones donated to us by the artists, sharing together this ever-expanding journey.
It will also be an opportunity to have a first-hand proof that through the innovative educational practices art and culture can play a key role in transforming the society.