A vinyls collection about real humans, not based on facial recognition. Ten tracks to create mutual awareness in alternative ways.
The course in Visual Arts in Socio Political Context helped me to open my mind to the various practices of involving people, making me reflect on the different forms that a Design project can take, not only as a physical or digital product, but also through activities and workshops. “Play and reflect” is a project born thanks to the conversations with the people I had the opportunity to meet in this new beginning in Antwerp and who in most cases are, like me, “new” in the city. Talking to people from different parts of the world made me reflect on how divergent the “obstacles” to arriving in a city can be, often simply due to different nationalities, or how much in a world where everything seems “within reach”, we are still so tied to certain stereotypes. In this digital age in which facial recognition claims to define human beings by collecting data, we realize that in reality we still know little about the people we share this planet with. The vinyls I created also represent a collection, but that has nothing to do with our aesthetic traits. Each vinyl summarizes a small story of the participants who took part in my workshop, during which, in random pairs, they had to carry out 10 different activities (which gave the name to the 10 vinyl tracks) to get to know each other in alternative and engaging ways. The activities were the pretext to stimulate broader conversations, some more curious, others more personal, others more profound. The content of the vinyls tells a lot about these people without the need to show their faces properly. Reflected images do not reveal to us a copy of reality, but they help us to observe it in a different way and to open ourselves to change perspective.