Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

We Are Here’ is a project that engages people who are facing challenges, struggles or barriers in their everyday lives in a creative partnership with artists and digital media producers to produce creative and insightful self-portraits to give expression to their experiences, issues, aspirations and concerns – visual statements about their lives and circumstances, their hopes, aspirations, experiences, pasts and futures. Operating in four European countries, selected communities will work over a nine month period (between June 2010 and February 2011) to produce their own self-portraits – giving a voice to people who rarely get a chance to speak out about their lives. ‘We Are Here’ is working in the UK with teenage parents in Leeds, Barrow in Furness, Ashington in Northumberland and Teesside; in Italy with young people at risk of social exclusion in the city of Padova and Camposampiero and Citadella; and in Serbia and Hungary with young refugees and from Roma communities. Working with artists, photographers and filmmakers the young parents are producing self-portraits and media material that reflects their lives, their thoughts, aspirations, experiences and challenges. These will be presented as a set of single images for exhibition, posters for use in public spaces and in schools, online and films will be screened at special events. The project has also worked alongside some of the events and works being undertaken by the Social Inclusion Regional Group (SIRG) led by the Northeast of England Office as part of the European Year of Poverty and Social Inclusion. Work will be exhibited at SIRG events and in public spaces including billboards and transport networks throughout 2010 and in early 2011.