Encounter

Park Poétik sees the public space as an active meeting place for young and old, and therefore seeks out the public where they are with a wide variety of poetic interventions to increase the possibilities of participation. Park Poétik aims to be multilingual.

PARTICIPATORY SUMMER OF ARTS...

Throughout the summer, we are sowing seeds of wonder in the streets, on the squares and in the parks to provoke an explosion of impressions and reactions. Different  participation strategies  will be used to target  different types of encounters  with over 100 poetic interventions. We use the continuum of participation developed by Dēmos, in which each strategy has a different approach to how to involve the public: from the purely accidental to the deliberate, from the participatory to the co-creative and space-making.

By employing various participation strategies during the summer of arts, we increase the chances of actively involving the public. The concepts are also developed in function of the environment and the audience present. With Park Poétik we mainly work place-oriented and thus seek out the public where they are, particularly in the public space. This approach strongly lowers the threshold and enables us to appeal to and involve a super-diverse target group, including people living in socially vulnerable circumstances. We are very aware that people in vulnerability are often deprived of culture and wonder.

The corona crisis has made this even more obvious: we must stand up for these people. Our target group is therefore a socio-demographic reflection of the neighbourhoods in which we work. Through the participatory and inclusive approach of spreading poetry, we turn the public space into an artistic meeting place and bring the arts closer to home, seeking answers to questions such as: Who has a right to culture? Who has a right to the city? For whom is art made? Who is excluded? Who is forgotten? Who is not represented? Participation in cultural life is not something that everyone can take for granted, which is why we want to put cultural participation for a broad audience at the centre of our objectives.

By our radically deploy public mediation on small encounters we succeed in reaching a wider and even more diverse audience and hope to be able to involve them. Through the dialogue we seek we give residents a voice and listen to their dreams so that they too can participate in Park Poétik. We want to do this as inclusively as possible so that people who are vulnerable are also entitled to culture.

Through the multitude of interventions in public spaces and our radical mediation, we were able to reach 25 000 people by 2021.

MULTILINGUALISM

Park Poétik systematically communicates bilingually in Dutch and French in all its official communications, but also often multilingually, with an emphasis on English and Arabic (website and social media). On the ground, Park Poétik embraces multilingualism even more and adapts to the environment so that volunteers, audience and artists can express themselves in their mother tongue in order to create a warm atmosphere where all Brussels people feel welcome. The manifesto (our dream) has been translated into more than 10 languages and we want to expand this phenomenon. We also create an environment where newcomers or non-native speakers can come into contact with Dutch in a positive way and have the opportunity to improve their language skills by offering internships and practice opportunities.