The Great African Caravan is the first major travel project by the Art Caravan Association. 12 international artists from all around the globe (India, Argentina, Britain, Uganda, Germany, and Kosovo) will travel for 7 months through the continent of Africa covering 12 countries. The adventurous journey started in July 2018 in South Africa, goes through South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sudan and end in Egypt in February 2019.
Throughout the journey, the artists will work with local humanitarian organisations, youth groups, and artists as well as further governmental bodies, cultural entities, and similar institutions to connect, strategise, design novel solutions for local challenges, and build awareness on SDGs with the broader aim of contributing to peace, global citizenship, and sustainable social change. In each country it will be collaboratively worked on a specific Sustainable Development Goals using art as a holistic, inspiring, and raising tool.
Workshops, dialogue creation, and art works will aim to raise awareness, offer sustainable tools for problem solving and peace building, and spread the spirit of interconnectedness, peace, and global citizenship. Individual projects as well as a documentary of the entire journey will additionally, each in their beautifully individual way, inspire, excite, and spread the mission of a better world. Furthermore, it will provide material to bring awareness, spark discussions, and increase participation regarding significant topics such as migration, borders, peace, environment, and human rights.
Considering changes, issues and challenges in the last decades as well as current events, borders in the physical and mental sense seem present everywhere. More important than ever it is now to connect humans beyond borders, to communicate and understand and respect each other. The artistes, however, believe in a world that goes beyond borders of genders, ages, and ethnicities where people live together with empathy and love; a world where care and harmony are recognised and practiced as basic human needs regardless of the challenges or individual backgrounds. To bring us closer to this imagined world we strive towards, this project will use art as a tool to jointly stimulate dialogue-facilitation, conflict-resolution, and peace-building.
Collaborating with local institutions, social organisations, local artists as well as youth groups here is central to the process not only to design the efforts as inclusive, interdisciplinary, and versatile as possible, but also as to recognise the importance of centralising the work around the wisdom, knowledge, and ways of solutions locally and regionally present.
To incorporate the diversity of participants in this project, a common language is needed. Art as one of the most inclusive, holistic, and non-violent languages will thus be explored. Art in itself is a celebration of human capabilities. It enriches lives and gives relief from its pragmatism. It helps to transcend the miseries of daily life and takes to the heights we aspire to reach. It is a medium to communicate ideas and beliefs, joys and sorrows, hopes and despair; it adds an extra dimension to our existence altogether. It is a tool to facilitate dialogue between communities, it is an instrument of interexchange of cultures and ideas, it is a way of communicating.
In light of current challenges, it is the more important, by now even substantially significant, to find a way, a language to connect humans beyond borders and to communicate their views, issues, ideas, solutions, thoughts, and perspectives. What better way is there to directly connect with others than through traveling and diving into the new? Travel transforms the unexplored into mainstays of knowledge; it widens the horizons of thoughts and ideas; it boosts the exchange of culture and tradition; it helps to converse with the world; it merges our traces to that of humankind; it is one of the best ways for spreading message to masses; and it enables culture in its richest expressions to be shared and learned from. In short, it is an effective and outstanding way of connecting humans beyond borders.
This combination of art, travel, and social change is the centre, the heart of this project while connecting beyond borders remains the leading aim.
