Earlier this month, Miranda Aguilar and Andrea Lim were invited by Multicultural Youth Affairs Network NSW (MYAN NSW) were invited to run a creative workshop around relationships to family, culture and tradition for the Codebreakers Program. This workshop, titled Tradition & Me, was devised based on the Handle With Care workshop model Miranda and Andrea have been running over the past few months.
The Tradition & Me workshop, held over Zoom, invited Codebreakers participants to a workshop around conversation and collage-making. Facilitators and participants alike held space for each other. During the workshop, participants were lead through a grounding meditation session. They then shared objects that represented their thoughts and feelings around their relationship to their family and culture. Afterwards, they created collages using creative packages with magazines, paper and other art supplies provided by MYAN NSW.
The collage prompt was:
You are on a journey, and you’ve come to a place where you can offer yourself care. You will have to venture out again, but for now, you can take this time for yourself.
What will you give yourself right now?
Even though the workshop is over, you can still follow this prompt! Use whatever materials you have that feels right, whether it’s stickers, markers, printer paper or old packing materials from packages. Your relationship to your families and your culture(s) may be multi-faceted and complicated, and you can hold as many or as little of these thoughts as you want in your collage. No matter what you’re feeling, or what your skill level is with visual art, you can make a collage and give yourself what you need right now.
Thank you to all the Codebreakers participants for holding space with us during this workshop, and to Hannah Lai and Izabella Antoniou at MYAN NSW for organising this workshop with us!
The Codebreakers Project engages young people from Western Sydney in conversations about race, identity and belonging on social media. It is supported by the Western Sydney Community Forum, Blacktown Youth Services Association (BYSA), and the Multicultural Youth Affairs Network (MYAN NSW).
