As humans, our relationship with our environment is crucial to our lives. Although it is often not acknowledged within our current social and economic systems, our survival depends on the health of the natural world around us, and when nature enjoys a good relationship with us, we benefit greatly from the gifts it gives us – clean air, nutritious food and relaxing ambience.

However, pollution and environmental exploitation remain all-too-prevalent themes in European societies. Too often, we take too much of what nature offers us, or we destroy natural habitats, causing problems for ourselves and other earthlings around us. That is to say that our relationship with the environment is often unbalanced and we don’t respect nature as being something much more than the things we take from it. In this youth exchange, we want to address this problem.

In order to examine our relationship with our environment, we want to make music and art in and about nature. By taking inspiration, sounds, images and materials from the natural world around us, we will ask what it means to exploit and objectify our environment and also what it means to live in harmony with nature. The overall aim is to look at how we look at nature – to look at the looking glass – to explore that relationship and play with it through art.

We will work in a natural setting in central Slovenia using a mixture of methods – through a combination of reflective processes and technical workshops we aim to provide a programme for participants that will enable and empower them to engage with the topic and to create works of art that also engage with it. All workshops will follow non-formal learning methodologies and a DIY approach.

We also strongly believe in horizontal learning and so knowledge-sharing will be an integral part of the programme. The programme will be open for all art forms, but the workshops will focus more on the forms that we, the team, are more personally familiar with, which are music, music production, poetry and photography. We warmly invite young artists to come and explore and create with us.

During the exchange, we would like that the participants achieve the following goals:

• they learn from each other about environmental problems and solutions in other countries
• they reflect on their own relationship with the environment on a personal level
• they gain a new perspective on their impact on environment
• they gain new skills in music and/or art production
• they produce works (and present them to peers and the public (this part will be encouraged but certainly not obligatory)
• they produce work that thematically explores nature and our relationship with it
• they gain inspiration and confidence for producing and presenting future work

Youngsters (18-30 years old) that…