Takeover Week
Matera
The trip to Matera in June 2022 was the first opportunity to get together, the aim of the week was to organise ourselves as a team and collectively work through ideas in order to come up with a creative project and a practical plan of how we were going to achieve it.
Participants
There were 20 of us in total, coming from 5 different countries (Italy, North Macedonia, Cyprus, Poland, and the United Kingdom). We came from a variety of creative backgrounds, ranging from comic book artists to music producers, each with unique experiences and perspectives to bring to the table, both because of our creative niches and where we came from.
A Week of Work
We started the week off with getting to know each other a little bit and showcasing the local arts projects that had been done in each of our countries and ended the first day off with a visit to the Noi Ortadini project in Matera.
Then, over the next few days, we continued to get to know eachother better through doing a variety of team building and mind mapping activities with the aim of forming a team and decided on what the theme and form of our project were going to be!
The first step was to choose a theme!
As inspiration, we focused on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and after discussing and exploring the options, we voted and decided to focus our project on the theme of climate change, with the goal of educating people about it.
The next step was to decide on what form we wanted our project to take. With the help of the mentors, we decided the best process for figuring this out would be to come up with something based on our collective skills and experience – so we began with doing some exercises to explore that!
Out of this came the idea to run a social media campaign.
And finally, we began to structure the team around this idea, assigning roles and responsibilities to everyone, and then got to work on creating the foundations of our project – including setting up a platform for communication and management (the Discord server), coming up with a timeline for the campaign and getting started on the visual identity and content of our project.
The BEE Active Project
The result of these days in Matera became the BEE Active project, a campaign to raise awareness about the problems of climate change. The team of young people needed minimal support from the mentors to achieve an brilliant and detailed project plan including branding, social media accounts, the first post of the campaign, roles and task allocations, and an amazing amount of creative work collated in just 4 days. The BigTime Takeover was successful! All the copy content, visual material, comic, and video that you can see in the BEE Active section was produced by the young people.
