Members of the Culture Resource team traveled to Tunisia from 20 to 25 January to organize two workshops, one on podcasting in partnership with the British Council, and the other on cultural policies in the Arab region. While there, they took the opportunity to meet with artists and other cultural actors in Tunis.

Mudawanat workshop

The first workshop “Mudawanat“ for podcasters in Arts and Culture in the Arab region, organized in partnership with the British Council, was held from 20 to 25 January at Minassa where participants attended hands-on sessions in sound design and podcast production and learned how to prepare, script, and execute their projects.

The workshop’s aim was to encourage the participants to share and exchange their expertise and knowledge in different methods and formats of podcast creation, as well as to experiment as they honed their podcasting skills under the guidance of specialists in audio production and editing. In both theoretical and practical sessions, the participants learned about the fundamentals of audio production, recording inside and outside the studio, editing and sound design. Other sessions focused on the editorial of podcasts to match the subjects of interest of the participants and included exercises in proposal writing, scriptwriting and preparing the technical rider template for the various stages of the podcast production. There were also sessions that focused on publishing aiming to enable the participants to convey their ideas to wider audiences in the culture sector and to attract new audiences to contemporary critical productions. The workshop was facilitated by three experts in podcasting: Salim Salameh (Jordan), filmmaker and trainer with Sowt podcast production company; Ziad Moukarzel (Lebanon), music producer and studio engineer; and Emma Conneely (UK), trainer specialized in podcast commissioning and publishing with the BBC.

The participants will start working on a series of podcasts that will be launched by Culture Resource in partnership with the British Council in two seasons, on different online platforms. The conceptual and thematic framework of these series was debated with the participants in a collective session during the training week. The suggested themes revolved around known and unknown urban legends and the accounts of transformations and equivalents, as the Mudawanat project, as a living archive, aggregates the participant’s contributions that document the contemporary culture sphere.

Cultural Policies workshop

 

The second workshop, on Cultural Policies, was held at L’Art Rue from 21 to 26 January. Organized in response to new and pressing needs in the Arab region, the workshop aimed to re-examine the concept of cultural policies in light of major changes and developments in the region. Towards this end, experts and researchers in the field were invited to join in the discussions and exchanges of knowledge and expertise.

A participatory and interactive format was adopted in order to engage participants, experts and guests from the region in addressing the following topical areas: The current definitions of cultural policies )the different types of cultural policies and their components, the stakeholders involved in policy design and development, and ways to develop local definitions of cultural policy for the Arab region(; The levels of cultural policy action from the regional and the national to the local municipal level, and an examination of some previous experiences in these frameworks; A critical reading of the UNESCO Convention of 2005 on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions; A discussion of the content of the Report on Cultural Policies in the Arab Region which is produced every four years.

The Cultural Policies workshop also included a joint session with the Mudawanat workshop featuring a tour to introduce both groups to Tunis and the state of culture in Tunisia from the perspective of local artists and cultural activists.

Gathering with artists and local cultural actors

In view of the presence of its team members in Tunis and in order to promote dialogue, networking and cultural exchange, Culture Resource organized a gathering at Dar Lasram to meet with fellow artists, cultural actors and partners in Tunisia. The gathering featured Badiaa Bouhrizi and her band in concert; a comics exhibition by Seifeddine Nechi and Kamal Zakour from Soubia, and Aroussi Tabbena, Rim Bouras and Helmi Bardaa from Lab 619; and light installations by Aziz Issaoui, Haifa Ourfelli and Khouloud Benzarti from the Interférence collective.

You can listen here to Badiaa Bouhrizi’s concert.