Europeana’s Digital Storytelling Festival encourages cultural heritage professionals, educators, creatives, and students around the world to boost their storytelling skills and tell stories exploring culture. Its first residency has experimented with doing just that with a small group of students and new professionals, focussing on gaining storytelling skills in a professional setting.
Along with specialist mentors, the participants worked in three formats - writing, social media, animation - to produce content celebrating queer stories, narratives and cultural heritage from all around Europe, to add to our LGBTQ+ feature page.
Animation
Working with animation mentor Nick Cave, Marina Schilke and Aida Naasan Aga Spyridopoulou produced gifs, animating works such as ‘Jane Avril’ by Toulouse Lautrec and ‘The Kiss’ by German artist Peter Behrens.
Marina says, 'I used The Kiss by Peter Behrens. I like the people's androgynous features and the way the layers of the hair seem fluid and interwoven. I wanted to reinterpret it using the Progress Prideflag colours. I couldn't animate the faces, because the tracing was too difficult, but I did animate the hair and created different versions.’
Read Marina's story
Aida says, ‘I participated in the animation residency of Europeana, where my project centres around the exploration of Toulouse Lautrec's posters featuring Jane Avril and the vibrant cabaret scene of that era. Using the resources of Europeana's extensive archive, I found creativity in the concept of transtextuality and delved into the queer life of the people of the cabaret scene. I read papers, articles, blogs and at the same time I slowly crafted my animated GIFs.’
Read Aida's story
Social media
Mentors Carola Carlino and Marianna Marcucci worked with three participants to create social media posts. The topics included LGBTQ+ history in Eastern Europe, queer slang and gender identity, and LGBTQ+ rights in Malta.
Carola says, ‘It was an enriching experience to meet new people and help them realise their fantastic ideas. They have different backgrounds and this diversity was an enriching element for their teamwork. They had clear ideas. In the workshops, it was interesting to observe their personal approach and ideas about the topic and the LGBTQ+ community and how to use social media to raise consciousness and awareness. I’m very happy to have been part of this.’
Eleni Maragkou says, 'I chose to focus on revealing hidden stories of resilience, which I chose to explore through three thematic posts. The themes were: queer slang, gender nonconformity across European history, and impactful queer cultural figures. A writer at heart, I challenged myself by condensing complex ideas and translating them into accessible and compelling visual content, drawing from the Europeana archive and personal research.'
Read Eleni's story
Volha Kavalchuk says, ‘The challenge was where to focus. I want to educate people on the LGBTQ+ history of Eastern Europe because I see misconceptions about the Soviet Union and post-Soviet countries from my western fellows. I did a lot of research and tried to transform the seriousness of it into something more fun and interactive for Instagram posts and reels.’
Read Volha's story
Audrey Rose Mizzi says, 'For me personally, it was important not to harm the community and bring it into focus. The topic I chose is also very sensitive, and can easily lead down a rabbit hole of negativity. Malta being deemed the safest place for LGBTIQ+ individuals for the 8th time in a row is surprising, considering that socially there's so much more to be done. Whether it's fear of the unknown, or religion, what's written on paper is not translated in real life. That's what I wanted to work on, and am still working on.'
Writing
Under the supervision of mentor Beth Daley, three participants looked at how Europeana collections could be used to inspire new writing. All three writers used the collections to build up a mental collage that shaped their ideas of time, place and character. Yasmine Ba and Joseph Degabriele explored elements of LGBTQ+ culture through informative writing on queer archives in Italy and on the concept of ‘coming out’, while Tonya Atanakova created a fictional story inspired by a gallery of items she curated through the Europeana website.
Yasmine says, ‘I applied to Europeana’s Online Creative Residency to gain more insights about how to write and cater for a digital audience, and to meet like-minded writers. I’ve learned a lot through the residency, from my peers but especially through the writing mentor Beth Daley, and received valuable tips in regards to finding my voice, choosing suitable visuals, and most importantly, on how to conduct effective and coherent storytelling.’
Read Yasmine’s story
Tonya says, ‘Storytelling, for me personally, is a balance between inspiration and imagination. For this project, I have drawn inspiration from Europeana collections to create galleries that inspired the characters. Then I let them tell me their stories. The goal is to take the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through time and explore the complexities of identity and love for LGBTQIA+ people.’
Read Tonya’s story.
Joseph says, 'I applied for the residency as I always wanted an opportunity through which I could practise my writing. I believe through this experience I have understood more about my process of writing and also discovered tools which can help me to further develop my writing experience.'
Read Joseph's story
Reflections
Aleksandra Strzelichowska, Senior Online Marketing Specialist, coordinated the residency. She says, ‘During the residency, we wanted to offer young people a safe space to explore, experiment and create. By encouraging them to work with cultural heritage collections, we wanted to show them they're part of the bigger picture. At the same time, through the stories they created, they contributed to raising awareness about queer culture and queer histories.’
For participants, this wasn’t just an opportunity to have their work published, it was a chance to explore queer culture, and for some, to feel accepted within that culture. One participant, Aida Naasan Agha Spyridopoulou, told us that, ‘Being part of the queer narrative through a creative process made me feel part of queer culture, and doing so made me feel more comfortable with my queer identity and my sexuality. In the end, feeling you have a queer heritage is very important.’
As a group, we have learned a lot from each other and the process, and we hope to run another residency next year. In the meantime, we hope to see this year’s participants continue their projects by collaborating with each other, and we’ll share their updates when we can.
We would like to thank all the participants and mentors and the team at Europeana Foundation for their commitment, enthusiasm and effort.
Are you feeling inspired by the words of the Residency participants? Why not watch the recordings from the Digital Storytelling Festival and find out how you can submit a blog with your own ideas.