Embedded Files
ZLB place great importance on ensuring equal opportunities for all their users and for them to be able to participate in the library’s services, with a free, low access threshold and without any (payment-based) barriers for citizens.
The programme work is based on three pillars:
1: The ZLB as a place of information and knowledge
2: The ZLB as a place of productivity
3: The ZLB as a forum of the urban community
The Challenge Journey
The Challenge Journey
Who are the community/citizens working on the Europe Challenge?
With the Europe Challenge we want to give a platform to the queer Community of Berlin. In Europe we are currently facing a political situation in which undemocratic movements have an increasing impact. In this situation societal groups are affected very differently by this political climate. In fact, queer communities are under pressure all across Europe.
How did you identify and engage your community?
In Berlin and especially in the neighbourhoods next to our library queer persons are very present. At the same time, they are consistently attacked by transphobic violations and they also encounter a lack of understanding for their identity. So, by providing a platform in our library for the community with the Europe Challenge project we intend to be a safer space which aims to be empowering and elucidating.
During the pandemic it turned out that reaching out to the community via gate keepers didn´t work well. Instead, we published an Open Call for Participation which brought us an extensive feedback form the community. https://twitter.com/zlb_Berlin/status/1428726882451787783
What is your overall challenge topic? Which concrete challenges have your communities decided to address and why?
#queeringthelibrary - together with the queer (LGBTIQ)-Community in our neighborhoods we want to find answers to the question:
How can citizens (respectively the queer community) co-shape the European Public Space in and with libraries?
Team #1: Oyoun – KulturNeuDenken gUG
Title: Unheard and unseen of
Every country in Europe is experiencing migration and the mixing and re-formation of languages. So this approach brings into the focus queer perspectives and the used language of queer people with a migration biography.
“Which archiving practices exist in different local areas and are visible in the affected communities without recognition of the hetero- or homo-normative mainstream of cities? The focus is primarily on alternative practices, collections of narratives, actions of communities in solidarity, intergenerational support and the overlap of resistance movements.”
Team #2: Transcoded (Transcodiert)
Representation can take place in different areas. For queer people who are interested in arts and literature there is a lack of high quality words and writings for their own identity in the public space and in published books.
“This project is about creating stories to search for this identity - from the community for the community - and to see the problems that go along with it written down, means empowerment. Furthermore, it offers the cis-normative society the ability to question your binary-sex perspective because the expression through art creates a special approach.” (Biba Nass, Transcodiert Magazine)
Team #3: mehr_blick (Tam* and Tamo*)
“Many stories told in picture books and children books don´t represent queer perspectives in terms of queerness, family diversity, gender, identity and the presented role images.
There is a big need for innovative approaches to deal with those gaps and find new ways how to initialize a reflection and a dialogue about that. In addition to queer issues, visibility for other forms of discrimination can also be created within this project.” (Tam* and Tamo*)
How are your communities driving the challenge and what tools are they using? How are they reimagining public space?
Oyoun wants to test an interactive, dialogical installation in the library, at the venue of Oyoun and in an TinyHouse on wheels at selected nodes in the neighborhood. This interactive installation invites the visitors to explore collaborative memories and narratives that make queer perspectives visible in the public space. It is an experimental, participatory and inclusive approach to make queer, migrant and under-represented perspectives visible in and for the public.
The team of “Transcodiert” explores a cross-medial platform consisting of a queer literature magazine on the one hand and bringing the queer artists to the public space in the library to have a public exchange with the visitors on the other hand. Especially the second part, offering a dialogue in our public library, links perfectly to the libraries potential, which is providing a public space for discussion, debates and knowledge sharing. So, this cross-medial platform is an artistic, interactive and inclusive approach to give queer perspectives a public visibility and invites the public to a dialogue about queer identities.
Tam* and Tamo* will develop so called “reading glasses”. This creative solution is going to be added to books for young people and invites them to reflect on the presented content in a critical way. The design of those “reading glasses” is going to be developed in the course of this project. Those “reading glasses” will give opportunities to use children and youth literature as a better instrument to be socialized in much more multidimensional ways, including also queer perspectives. These glasses intend to make questions and problems visible, so the books can be read in several dimensions. Once as "normal" books and once -with the glasses- as books with a visualization of discrimination.
How do you see the solutions to your local challenge being replicable / adaptable for other people and in other European contexts?
While all of the three prototypes have a clear framing in terms of (1) creating a cross-medial platform (Transcodiert), (2) testing a moving, interactive, dialogical installation and (3) developing a creative solution for the “reading glasses” they can be adapted as a best practice approach in other European cities as well.
All three approaches relate to European core values like Protection of minorities, Pluralism and Anti-discrimination.
Articles and publicity
Articles and publicity
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