Category Archives: Projects

CITIZENS LAB

In April C&C was invited/selected to become one of the founding members of the European Citizens Lab.

Funded by the European Cultural Foundation, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Stiftung Mercator, this new initiative links artists, journalists, architects, politicians and change makers from all over Europe. The ambition is to create a common ground for cultural collaboration, showing that there is more that we, people from Europe share, than what divides us.

Citizen Lab will also promote and provide tools and expertise for social change to grass-root initiatives, thus driving participatory processes for change.

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Stowaways

To celebrate the great Dutch painter Jheronimusch Bosch, who died 500 years ago, there will be a impressive parade of floating art objects drifting through the city of den Bosch. Working with a group of people who are recovering of their drugs and alcohol addiction, Peer de Rijk, Mirthe Wacki and Ed Santman will be working on a contribution for this parade based upon the Jheronimusch Bosch painting of the Ark of Noach. It is a big project and it will take us much of April, May and June to realize it. The result of the project can be seen in den Bosch on 16, 18 and 19 June.

Boschparade interview Ed Santman

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Real Life, partnermeeting in Bologna

Lots of dicussions during and after the partnermeeting of the Real Life project in Bologna. There was so much to discuss, two and a half days were hardly enough. But at the last day we really made a lot of progress and we all went home with clear ideas on how to continue with the project. In the next month we will frequently have Skype sessions to prepare the first training, that will take place in September in Rotterdam.

C&C Partnermeeting Bologna

Real Life Project kick-off

RealLife is an innovative project in which serious gaming and virtual reality are used to improve skills needed in the 21st century and skills needed for employability aiming at those at the edge of society, especially prisoners. Training skills in a safe and virtual reality will help prisoners to function in real life, give them new skills and enhance their sense of initiative.

The objective of the project, is to develop an innovative tool, the Real Life game with a certificate that validates the process of informal learning, that takes place while playing the game. Real Life will design a strong tool for disadvantaged groups by implementing seven pilots in six European countries that will include 80 prisoners, 14 mentors and 35 prison guards. Focus will be on different groups, youngsters between 17 and 23, woman and (older) men.

The ultimate target groups of Real Life are those who lack basic skills and failed in the traditional education system. Within this group the focus is on those who have been, or threaten to become in contact with Justice and criminal law.

Not only digital literacy is low among this group, a lack of skills, necessary for finding a job often leads to an existence in the margins of society.  Many of them have bad experiences with regular formal education. The innovative approach of Real Life will offer them opportunities for working on the improvement of basic skills and competences. We will use digital tools like Serious Gaming (SG) and Virtual Reality (VR) as an effective strategy to work on their soft skills and thus improve their chances on employability. Another important target group are the future mentors, people working directly with prisoners or other disadvantaged groups), like educational staff within prison or people from local organizations.

The use of gamification is a user-friendly method that can be delivered on an individual basis to promote employability and reduce recidivism for prisoners. To measure effectiveness of the serious game, the partners will study the rate of recidivism in the first 48 hours to two months after prisoners leave detention.

This way the projectpartners are able to measure the impact of the game almost immediately and improve the game. The game will focus on new learning possibilities to be applied in prisons: digital tools, games that educate, train and inform, can provide an alternative sustainable learning tool for disadvantaged groups. Many among the end-users have learning disabilities and reject more traditional teaching approaches.

With the current possibilities digital media offer, it is realistic to expect that a team of experts, like the partners from Nottingham Trent University, will be able to develop a working serious game in a virtual environment during project Real Life.

Magazine “Seven Deadly Sins” now online

SALIGIA is the name of the magazine, that we made as a catalogue of the exhibition we organized in the Jeroen Boschhuis at Den Bosch.
The word SALIGIA is composed of the first letters of the Latin names of the “Seven Deadly Sins”: Superbia, Avaritia, Luxury, Invidia, Gula, Ira and Acedia. In English known as Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth, Wrath and Pride. We asked inmates from several European countries to make paintings or drawings inspired by these Seven Deadly Sins. The results can now be be seen in this catalogue.

Click on the photo for the complete version of the magazine.Magazine Saligia PICP

 

 

 

VALMOPRIS approved

Good news from Austria: the European project ‘Valmopris’ on validation of informal learning, in which we were invited to participate, has been approved. For us this is a very important subject. In this project we will be working with partners from the UK, France, Finland, Austria and Romania in the next two years. The project will start in September and will run for two years.

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Seminar “Meet us at the Turning Point”

On Friday June 19, in the Artemis Theatre in Den Bosch, we organised the seminar ‘Meet us at the Turning Point’.  This was also the final meeting of the European PICP project  http://picp-project.eu. Nice contributions on the value of the arts by Thijs Lijster (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), Fiona Curren (Koestler Trust London) and Professor Jan van Dijk who spoke about the perspective of the victim.

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Key Activity 1, mobilities approved

The application that we wrote under the Erasmus+ program for mobilies to visit conferences and courses elsewhere in Europe was approved. For the mobbilities we will work in a consortium with The Dutch branch of the EPEA (European Prison Education Association), stichting Valk en Uil, that works with dyslectic inmates and Netrex an organisation that provides e-learning programms that can be used in prisons.

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Bosch Parade

May and June were a busy months, with Mirthe Wacki, Jos Zandvliet and a group of ex-offenders and volunteers we worked several weeks on a contribution for the Boschparade.

The Boschparade is an annual parade of floating pieces of art inspired by the work of the Famous Dutch painter Jheronimus Bosch. Our inspiration was his painting “the Seven Deadly Sins”.

Lots of smiling faces, and positive press and more than 25.000 people who saw our work.

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