We are delighted to welcome you all to the launch of the VOLPOWER Digital Exhibition.
The core concepts of this exhibition are based on young people’s narratives that examine the everyday processes of volunteering, community, and youth empowerment. Reflecting on their lived experiences, VOLPOWER volunteers explore the changing landscapes of migration, identity, diversity and inclusion, while demonstrating the processes of skills development and relationship building gained through VOLPOWER volunteering activities. Our exhibition explores the importance of creative forms of expression and the value of young peoples’ artistic expression.
Utilising skills gained from their voluntary practices, and through their engagement with VOLPOWER, our volunteers, with the help from our associated artists, take the viewer on a visual and acoustic journey foregrounding volunteer accounts of hope, futures, and aspirations, while drawing on the combined influences of everyday rhythms and routines of daily life. Visual and audio documentation of VOLPOWER journeys, produced by the volunteers themselves, and brought to life with the help and creative innovation from our artists, bring to the forefront, volunteers own lived experiences of diversity, empowerment and cross-cultural inclusion across communities as diverse as Glasgow, Rotterdam, Malta, South Tyrol, Vienna, Zagreb and Ljubljana. VOLPOWER is a collaboration of academics, artists and research participants whose voices and experiences are narrated and shared in various creative formats. This exhibition presents these different voices in different formats – shining a spotlight on the process of academic and creative engagement with the public, and the results it can deliver inside and outside academia.