TOTEM – Crafting Dreams in Space is an innovative project that explores the interplay between conventional and unconventional forms of youth political participation. Its core aim is to challenge the dominant narrative of youth disengagement and promote alternative paths of civic and political expression. Framed within the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, TOTEM positions artistic production as a means of reclaiming both physical and social space, offering a fresh, creative lens on how young people engage with socio-political issues.
Using a hybrid methodology that combines Educational Drama, ProcessWork, and DIY making practices, participants will work with historical and personal materials – photos, poems, songs, maps, natural objects – to craft narrative pathways around the themes of crisis, trauma, and symbolic resistance. Through this process, youth will transform emotions and ideas into tangible artifacts and culminate the experience in a site-specific performative act that brings their stories into the public realm.
More than an artistic venture, TOTEM functions as a platform for youth empowerment, equipping young people with tools, skills, and vision for active civic engagement. By organizing three public events across diverse contexts, the project aspires to reshape the way we understand political participation – shifting the focus from institutional access to embodied, collective, and imaginative forms of public action.
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth.