Sometimes we are storytellers, other times we are spectators of storytelling. We create and search for stories because they form an imaginary line we rely on in order to move on. Our thought takes shape through narratives. Our life is interwoven with the stories and corresponds to them. Storytelling emerges from a primordial need of the spectator to witness the fact which is considered as the object of his prayer. We tell our story daily in order to put our experiences into coherent meanings, to overcome our isolation and to reunite with the world and our fellow human beings. If we don’t articulate our own narrative, as someone has said, someone else will do it for us. If society doesn’t arrive at a collective storytelling, another story will be imposed by others.
Story archive
The creation of caravanproject.org aims not only to effectively highlight the cultural work of our activity, but also to constitute a turning point of interaction and, furthermore, to enable a narrative repository, an interactive platform of multimedia narration, a space of an ever widening ecosystem of education, cooperation, coordination and feedback.
Our goal was to establish a common resource of tokens of our cultural inheritance which would be organically enriched over time. For this purpose, we prioritized the creation of a story archive. We aspire that this will be a reference point contributing to the maintenance of creation and participation within the local societies and inspiring the diffusion and the management of stories through their effective collection and storage.
Anyone who is interested is given the possibility to deposit human stories they have documented, through both their interaction with the exhibition space and the Caravan Project narrative seminars, as well as via the internet, thus contributing to the enhancement of narratives across Greece. Besides being openly, publicly accessible, these stories will gradually and systematically become a very useful tool through which other groups as well, cultural, educational or not, will be able to develop their own activities in the future.
Story workshop
In the Caravan Project’s story workshop, we wish to motivate the local societies for the documentation and preservation of human stories. For this purpose, in each visited place, we offer basic skills, tools and practices for their documentation to groups of adults, through seminars of creative storytelling.
The participants create stories in cooperation with the creators of the Caravan Project, based on specific storyboards and through various accessible technologies, such as digital storytelling. The production of stories and their deposition in the story bank is our final objective.
The educational seminars are held in the Caravan Project’s space, set in each location. Their duration is six (6) days, bringing together one group of thirty (30) participants. They are addressed to people of all ages, social classes and colors, therefore assuring the pluralism of voices.