Volunteers Work

Volunteers were invited to contribute photographs responding to various weekly concepts:

The Place around me | Me and my…… | Favourite Things | My Skills | What Makes Me Happy | Diversity | Inclusion | Thinking of VOLPOWER

The camera shutter clicks. A fleeting moment is captured in time as the image disappears and then returns. The captured moment not only represents a visual reference of something physical, it captures an experience: the humanity of the moment. Digital photography and lived experiences juxtapose one another in a temporal process of the kept image: the immediacy of the digital technology, and memory that is captured forever.

The photographic images within this exhibition resonate with, and transport the viewer to a moment in their own lives. The viewer is invited to process each image independently, and then connect the multiple images into a cohesive storyline. The relationship of all the images to each other provide the overall context of diversity, inclusion and empowerment, depicting the everyday lives, interests and journeys of young volunteers across varied social and cultural borders.

Volunteers were invited to engage with creative poetry writing. They were offered guidance and an exercise titled ‘I AM’. Some of our more experienced poets created their own poetic concepts. It may be assumed that volunteers writing from the same exercise would produce rather similar poems, however this is not the case. Our VOLPOWER volunteers are writing from their own experiences and in the first person. Their poems are therefore unique – allowing the personal experiences, spoken by young people themselves, to reveal the purposeful, public nature of their volunteering, while also reflecting the overlapping multiplicities of identity connected to the self and others.

Audio recordings of our volunteer’s poetry accompany the visual elements of our exhibition, incorporating the range of voices held within the project, and drawing on historical and everyday mutual understandings across cultures. The voices of the volunteers speak to the audience, sharing with them the hopeful, and at times contested, nature of diversity and belonging within their communities.

Strong & Confident

by Amy Daly, Glasgow. Scotland

I am strong and confident, but
I wonder about my decisions and what they mean I hear laughter as music
Like a stream to the soul
I see courage lurking within the shadows
And I see
The dancer that I aspire to be
Because…

I am strong and confident
Pretending to be the greatest of all time
But in the shadows lurks a little weakness.
I push myself
And stretch to reach those stars in my dreams Is it too much?
Judging myself too harshly?
Then I remember who I am
(because)

I am strong and confident
And these opinions are my own ‘Each to their own’ (I say)
I keep on dreaming for that day Success!
When I exceed all expectations The best version of myself!
I am strong and confident.

A Lonely Bird

by ADEWALE, South Tyrol. Italy

I am bird that flies with the wind, all alone.
I wonder why I fly so high, all alone.
I heard a strange sound and ask myself what could that be?
I saw a shadow of something but I couldn’t figure out what it is. I want to end being alone,
I want to be in a circle of birds
And fly together with them

I am a bubble of happiness
I wonder where does the happiness come from
I hear people’s laugther
I see people smiling
I want to understand why are they smiling? What are they happy about? But now I understand where does the happiness come from.
I say, it comes from your inside
I am a bubble of happiness.

I am awake in the middle of the night Wondering why
I hear a loud noise of silence
I see you

I want to hug away those shadows
To take a bath with you in all those colors
The blue of the deepest ocean and the yellow of the sunflower, The lilac of lavender fields
And the unspoiled white of jagged rocks up in the mountains

I am awake in the middle of the night
Pretending to be asleep
I feel so damn full of emptiness
I touch your soul and stroke your cheek
I worry about us, being just blossoms in the wind

I am awake in the middle of the night
Understanding that life is a mystery and our hands are tied All we can do is hug

I am funny when I am happy
I wonder about my tomorrows. Will I be happy then too?
Everyday day I hear my father’s voice, and I see my father’s face
Happiness: A Happy, healthy family
With freedom and security

I am funny when I am happy
And I feel free when I am playing football
I touch the hearts of my close ones Happiness: part pretend, part real.
I worry that I will be a failure in life
But, then I recall my father’s voice,
He always told me, “everything will be alright”

I am most useful when I am happy
‘Everything happens for a reason’, they say,
I now understand that to be true
I believe there’s a light at end of every tunnel
I try not to listen to the negative voices in my head And I hope to make my mother proud
I’d like to think I will.
I am funny, and an achiever, when I am happy.

Me?
I am loveable. I am fearless and
I am me
I wonder where we go when we fall asleep
I hear me a lot. I hear myself.
Constantly.
Telling myself to push through stress
I see me in five years;
Comfortable
Not too rich. Not too poor.

Me?
I put my headphones on, and
I pretend to listen to music – but I am listening,
Listening to people talk
I feel grey
Not happy. Not sad.
I touch the frozen heart of life
I remember
Being left to watch myself grow at age only two
I understand things don’t always work my way,
but I work my ways through things

Me?
I say, ‘the moments I spend feeling sad
Can be spent looking for happier moments’
I dream that I will become something, and make myself proud
Fulfilling my social obligations
Reflecting friendship in my actions
And becoming happier through this
I am me.

These digital displays showcase our young volunteers’ own montages of video, telling their personal stories in unique and creative ways. Demonstrating the skills they have developed as part of the VOLPOWER project, volunteers use their own phone cameras to produce digital ‘scrapbooks’ containing visual stories about their everyday experiences. The timeline of their video montages may be linear or non-linear, and in this sense, the young people are not just originating their own material, they are editing it too – asserting their own identities and visualising their cultural routines and rhythms with his or her own vision.