All sorts of interesting collaborative art/social change/community doco work has been going on in various parts of Africa for many years – I recall several years ago at the first 2 Fires Conference in Braidwood NSW (Australia) meeting a woman who had been facilitating participatory art projects with AIDS orphans with fascinating result…
HIV and AIDS continue to motivate a lot of collaborative art/doco work in Africa, including being one of the motivating factors for a number of projects run by the Centre for Visual Methodologies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The CVM is seeking to improve visual methods in social research as well as promote cultural production of media as a form of education – and has taken up HIV AIDS as a key theme in their work.
Staying in Africa there is an interesting organisation that has been established in Kenya called the Mwelu Foundation. The foundation is using photography and film production as empowerment, skill development and income generation for young people in the Mathare Valley slum of Nairobi. On their blog they have some really nice use of photography with small pieces of text that highlight issues for young people and others in their community.
Photo by Julius Mwelu copyright Mwelu Foundation
They have also been making some films around social issues in their community, which you can see on their website or utube. Julius Mwelu, founder of Mwelu Foundation, was part of an earlier project called Shoot Back that supported young people to take up photography (perhaps related to Shooting Back [?]- one of the foundation participatory photography projects run in the US in the ’80′s by Jim Hubbard who’s now one of the drivers of the Institute of Photographic Empowerment). The Mwelu Foundation is an example of the second generation of collaborative media projects that are emerging around the world, run by local people who have developed great skills and passion in participatory media in earlier projects and are spreading this work with their own projects and organisations. You can read an article from 1999 about the Shoot Back project by clicking here…