Producing Community Based Digital Resources with young people in Bouganville to support environmental advocacy
Many projects that bring together collaborative arts and collaborative documentary (or ethnography) practices begin with a simple aim of allowing a particular group of people to give voice to issues that effect them, rather than relying on outsiders to represent them. By providing individuals and communities with tools for self expression – be they still cameras, video cameras, audio-recording gear and editing equipment, or the means to publish and distribute their own writing, visual art or theatre – the goal is to allow people to control (or influence) the way that they and their community are represented.
Pacific Black Box Logo
Pacific Black Box is a project that began with such seemingly simple aims. In 2008 Taloi Havini, a Bougainvillian/Australian artist and international representative of Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom (BWPF), and Georgia McRae, a community development and youth worker from Melbourne collaborated to found Pacific Black Box Inc. Pacific Black Box (PBB) is a project focussed on supporting communities in Bouganville, who are directly effected by climate change in the form of rising sea levels, to undertake environmental advocacy through making Community Based Digital Resources – a kind of digital story telling made by young people in the participating communities.
For the past 2 years this project has been achieving that important initial aim – to give local people in Bougainville, and specifically young people from the Carteret Islands, the tools and forums to represent their experiences, issues and perspectives about climate change and its implications on their daily lives. (People from the Carteret Islands are currently having to leave their islands as they become increasingly inundated with salt water… see An Uncertain Future and other films on the PBB website for Islanders own words on this and other related issues).
Before the project started film and television crews from all over the world would arrive to film stories about rising sea levels, conduct interviews, film sequences and then fly back to where ever the came from, usually never to be heard from again. Not only did the resulting media productions never make their way back to Bouganville so the people who they were about could see them, very little action seemed to result from this kind of media coverage, and it left local people feeling a further sense of powerlessness about how to gain international support to tackle the very pressing issue of losing their homelands to the rising ocean.
As the quote on the PBB website attests this project has changed this dynamic… Nicholas Hakata, a Carteret Islands youth participant in the 2008 and 2009 Pacific Black Box training, says ‘According to me, from now and onwards I can do the documentation of my own island instead of letting outside countries do this’ . In 2008 PBB won the Community Prophets Award in the Human Rights Film Festival (Australia) for their media and environmental advocacy work.
You can check out the digital stories made in 2008 on the PBB website. These have not only found an international audience, but have begun an important process of dialogue between Carteret Islanders and people in the mainland Bougainville communities where they will have to move in coming years.
Now in its second year, and following a successful program in 2009 of training and research on needs and strategies, Pacific Black Box is developing a 3 year plan for train-the-trainer programs in Bougainville in media-making and community development. Watch this space for what develops down the line…
Bytheway… all PBB work is done on a voluntary basis, and they can use support… you can donate by following a link on their website or clicking here.
[...] wrote a few weeks ago about projects in the Pacific region that are using participatory visual practices to advocate for social and environmenta…, such as Pacific Black Box addressing displacement due to climate [...]