Tempelhof-Schöneberg Municipal Library

Encounter

Encounter is a multilingual workshop and media project by activists, artists, journalists, scientists, students and interested people from different countries, mostly based in Berlin, who want to create a conflict-competent and tolerant society, in which differences of opinion and multiple affiliations give rise to curiosity and exchange. Our goal is to create a different discourse and a greater wealth of perspectives in the migration and integration debate in order to work against prejudices and generalisations that are expressed in the public on topics such as religion, identity, disability, gender and culture.

In an age dominated by digital information and social media, we often forget that which is obvious. How does our neighbour actually live? What can we learn from people in our immediate environment? For us, neighbourhoods are spaces of learning and conscious encounters which we facilitate through our creative workshops focusing on (digital) storytelling, illustration, collages, photography, film, or associative writing. Our method is anthropologically inspired and follows the idea of reflective positionality, multi-perspectivity and multilingualism. Our book: “What happens when we meet? Encounter as a method for transcultural learning” (2022) is out at Waxmann.

Since 2015 I am one of the founding members of the Encounter network. From June 2019 to September 2020, I was employed as the project coordinator of the Encounters media workshops, a project that emerged from the Encounter network, at Mauerpark Institut e.V. and was responsible for coordinating numerous workshops, exhibitions, readings and film screenings at all locations of our project partner, the Tempelhof-Schöneberg municipal library in Berlin. Together with our art director, I was in charge of the editorial supervision of our quadrilingual blog and print magazine and managed the budget that was available to us as a funded project in the »hochdrei – Stadtbibliotheken verändern« (»changing municipal libraries«) fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. I also organised communications with our core team of 15, the library staff and the Encounter network of about 60 people from 20 countries. The aim of the Encounters media workshops was to develop the public library space as a space of gathering and interaction as well as the creative, collaborative creation of media.

Since 2025 I am one of the managing directors of the Encounter GbR.

Categories / Organisations & Bureaucracies / Project Coordination
Employer / Mauerpark Institut e.V., Tempelhof-Schöneberg Municipal Library
Funded by / German Federal Cultural Foundation
Time / 2019–2020
Place / Berlin
Foto / Medienwerkstatt Encounters, Luiza Folegatti

Further information /
Encounter Blog in Farsi, Arabic, English and German