Skateboarding, Media and the Arts
For the last six months, we have been collaborating with 7Hills Skatepark (Amman, JO) to explore informal and non-formal approaches to teaching media and artistic skills. With the support of the Swedish Institute, through the Creative Force program, we have had the opportunity to invite Kaspar Wauters and Mohammed Zakaria, co-directors at 7Hills to spend two months at STPLN to co-design a catalogue of workshops for teaching media skills to youth. Later on, we went to Amman for a week to pilot this program through a three-day workshop with 16 of the youth leaders from the skatepark.
“At the park in Amman, we receive around 250 local and refugee kids a week coming for skate classes. Having this time to come to Malmö and see first-hand the Nordic approach to skateboarding and public spaces and how important it is to have noncommercial places for people to be creative was very enlightening. We are super excited to start running new workshops for the kids who come to the park so that they can come, have a skate, and maybe learn how to make a short film or illustrate new graphics that can be printed on a board or t-shirt.”
Left: one of the results from the paper-based stop motion workshop with the 16 youth leaders from 7Hills held at Jadal Culture Space, in Amman. This workshop was led by Dorkzone, a Malmö-based creative collective merging skateboarding with handmade playful ideas. The results from this workshop were later turned into board graphics (below left) and printed stickers. The youth leaders also took over 7Hills instagram account as a means to begin producing and releasing their own content (below right)
