Backpacking Tales

To show the power of oral and written stories, especially in light of children´s education, four workshops are being set upwith a team of four illustrators (two from an Arabic, two from a German context). They are encouraged to share views and ideas on pictures and images for education material based around a book of illustrated trilingual fairy tales (Arabic, German, English).

Through the collective process the artists and the young people they are working with gain mutual insight in their working tools, as well as in the concepts that constitute their imagery. The learning process of the artists can be transferred into creativity workshops with children and school classes that go beyond the simple hierarchic story telling-listener scheme. Listening to the stories while taking a look at the images and, by that, getting inspired to imagine own stories and images the children are enhanced to become creative and sensibilized for realities and images of other cultures. They will interact with the artists and teachers, but also reflect on own mental images of fairy tales and Arabic tradition in particular. By this, symbolic meanings as carriers of history and culture and a common artistic language can be intertwined with an exchange of different illustration traditions. In return, this allows a productive view of the own culture from the point of others, visualized.

The intercultural cooperation between the four artists will unfold itself in different stages: starting with an assessment of artistic and cultural prerequisites to develop a multiple imagery perspective on fairy tales they will be enabled to work in school classes in Cairo and Berlin at the beginning of the new school year. Out of this, they can use their experiences in close cooperation with the two storytellers (one Arabic, one German) that they drew from the workshops to finalize their sketches. The outcome (texts, images, photos, films, audiobook) can be used as further teaching material and source for creativity and story teller workshops.