TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Ilia Toshkin
Using clay to give gestalts to several negative systemic factors in the common perception of collective imagination through intuitive modelling. It was created for the participants of the monthly meetings of the Imaginary Institute - a spin-off project of CLEA, VUB, Brussels. As a way to give shape and image to elements of the creative unconscious, the creative modelling was specifically applied to the values of the II - a place where imagination and play are focal points of thought and action. This activity was designed to help the cultural workers define their own issues and experiences as cultural workers in different contexts, while also providing the whole collective with specific structure to understand its own strategy.
Target grout - artists, social practitioners, youth workers, researchers and university teachers from the UK, Hungary, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Romania
During the activity, two main methods were used - intuitive modelling with clay and systemic object work with interactions. During the activity, the participants were asked to share in pairs about up to three negative factors in the way people perceive collective imagination as a realm of social and personal life, according to their own understanding. Then each pair chose one single factor to work on, gave intuitive form of it - still in pairs, by working with closed eyes on the same piece of clay, from two sides. Then, each creator pair had to reflect on the shape they created, put a label on it and position it in the middle of the systemic space. At the end, we added two ready-made objects to represent Collective Imagination and Society and the group explored the positions of each object having the option to change its place once or twice and by speaking out its voice each time. The activity ended with a sharing round to comment and give feedback.
The outcomes of the activity were met with a high degree of success as it was escpecially tailored to facilitate the self-image of cultural workers and researchers at CLEA. Participants shared they gained clear insight of how main negative factors could shape the public understanding of the imagination as a common space and common ressource of the human mind.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1v8cJ8sBLFRl0mOA4W7jWMQWKSkOgbPvo
https://clea.research.vub.be/imaginary-institute
As a part of the team of the Imaginary Institute, I am responsible for the Department of Collective Imagination and Shared Subjectivity. It's aim is to explore archetypal and intercultural aspects of Imagination as an universal element of human cosciousness and shared subjectivity as a systemic phenomenon that appears on the level of the group as an instance of social reality at large.