Partners of the project “Staring at goats, Propaganda, Scapegoating and the Other 1918-2018˝ held a work meeting in Weimar from the 14th till the 19th of October 2018. The project is sponsored by the European union’s programme „Europe for citizens” and Documenta is one of five partner organizations in it. The carrier of the project is Culture goes Europe organization from Erfurt which at this occasion was the host of the work meeting. The other organizations in the project are Estonian Institut of Historical Memory from Estonia and the organizations UMAR from Portugal and United Societies of Balkans from Greece.
The goal of the project is to deconstruct the process of creating the identity of the Other through history; it focuses on the last 100 years. Special attention will be paid to the construction and the political instrumentalization of the Others and the Different ones with the aim of social and political mobilization in autoritarian and totalitarian systems. Primary historical  sources as photographs, news texts, posters and films will be subjects of the analysis.
The combination of the methods of nonformal education and international publicity campaign will highlight the continuity between the past and the present, as well as the mechanisms used to construct the Others, which are omnipresent and still relevant today. This project aimes at provoking citizens to reflect on their own discriminative and excluding behaviour, to awake them to critically examine this behaviour so that they avoid it in the future.
The aim of the work meeting in Weimar was to consider and elaborate the course of the project and all of its activities. In the course of 5 days representatives of partner organizations discussed further steps for realization of the project. During the winter the partners will work on the preparation of an international one-week spring school, which will take place in March and will bring together 45 participants, who are interested in topic of the project.

Tags: