Homelands, places of belonging is a community co-creation project for and by refugee and newcomer artists, led by the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation and its partners. 

Newcomer/refugee artists collaborate with partners from the socio-cultural sector and engage in a process of artistic co-creation with the local community. A colourful mix of projects will arise in the 3 regions with the notion of “HOMELANDS” as a common thread: an artistic research on what it means to feel at home, to belong to a place, a city or a community.

The Homelands project promotes social inclusion by creating a sustainable dialogue between Belgian citizens and newcomers/refugees through one of the most powerful tools of each culture: ART.

When talking about Homelands we often highlight the artists and their partners who are at the hearth of the project, but an important part of the project is the continuous training  around intercultural artistic co-creation and the involvement of international experts in co-creation. Indeed, the artists and their partners receive intensive training and advice from the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation’s Artist Ambassadors as well as external experts. Co-creation has become a fashionable concept, increasingly put forward not only as a tool to involve audiences but also to foster inclusion.  Within co-creation, the participants do not just participate in what already exists, but they become decision-makers within the artistic processes, within the design and implementation. Co-creation is, by nature, inclusive and multicultural. In co-creation, people meet each other and share ideas through creation something together, and this is when unexpected outcomes emerge. One of the outcomes is that institutions become embedded within the communities it reaches and the cultural diversity it reflects. However, co-creation is not improvised, it is an art. An art that needs to be supervised, followed and learned by co-creative professionals and this is what we propose through the Homelands project.  Refugee and newcomer artists but also their partners from the socio-cultural and education sectors receive throughout the project several training sessions including one-week artistic residency in order to acquire the necessary tools to undertake intercultural artistic co-creation projects with local communities.

The trainers of the project are International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation artist ambassadors or artists specialized in the art of co-creation and who share the values of the Foundation and the project.

Here is a glimpse into the heart of these trainings.