Rapping citizens

The alternative and artistic environment of our hostel in Metelkova inspired our participants to deal with the topic of minorities and borders in a different way…

Window painting the End of an Empire: The Fall of Yugoslavia

Without any further ado…

You can leave your map on

Among many other interesting  – and before unexperienced – challenges, our participants also took the roles of geography/history lecturers, who presented shifts in the borders of their countries as well as the reasons, causes and the consequences created by changing the borders. Our national border experts contributed to our knowledge and awareness about the meaning and influence of state borders. We realised how third-party’s (usually the war-winners) decisions about the size and shape of the losing states can cause severe consequences for the people living in territories. Nationalities changed, homes were lost, families separated…

Once great and extensive multinational empires slowly shrank in the course of history and new nation states were created. People living on the very same territory sometimes changed their citizenships multiple times due to the often changing border-lines. Some decided to stay and accept their new citizenship, while others decided to migrate; to follow the sometimes very elusive border-line in order to once again live inside the borders of that country, which represents the fundamental part of their national identity.

What exactly happened with Poland, the Austro-Hungarian empire, focusing especially on the later established states of Austria and Slovakia and how Finland’s development into an independent state is presented by our participants in the following videos. Enjoy an interesting and original history lessons, as we did here in Ljubljana.

Poland between the 3 dragons:

The end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the beginning of new states

The Finnish independence

What really happened … during the Paris Peace Conference

During the seminar ‘End of Empires’ in Slovenia, our participants discussed a lot about how decisions about border changes the division of territory and the founding of new national states often were made by other ‘greater’ powers. This is how they imagine the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I

THE EUSTORIAN: Two countries, one city?

DAY 6: CREATIVITY REACHING ITS PEAK

Our Eustory youth academy in Ljubljana is ending. We only have few hours together left before we all leave to airports and departure towards our home-countries. However, it is important to emphasise what a wonderful last working day we have spent today. We started our day with the last round of playing toasters, islands, washing machines, elephants and street lamps – a game that no Eustorian ever forgets. After a warm-up, we did a serious exercise with our brains, when we participated in a heated exchange of opinions and positions on very controversial statements concerning the issue of minorities. The strength of our agreement or disagreement with the statements was expressed with us moving from one part of the room to the other – from agreeing part to the disagreeing one or by just standing somewhere in the middle.

The day continued in a very productive mood, since participants split into three different groups, all working on the final presentation of our work in Ljubljana.

Two groups are working on a video presentation covering different aspects of the project, while the third group decided for a rather unconventional format choosing a rap-musical sum-up of the discoveries of the youth academy.

We will keep it short in this post and let you wonder a little about the final results, before posting them in the following days ;D