ForesTEEN is a European cooperation project of research and innovation of audience development models of young adults audiences understood as boys and girls between 15 and 25 years old.
The project wants to investigate the potential of transgenerational dialogue and create a community that believes in the importance of focusing on adolescence as a developmental phase that brings innovation, creativity, and resilience.
With a wide range of activities throughout starting from the 9th of November all the way through to the 8th of November 2027, the first live meeting of the new, ForesTEEN Consortium, took place at the ASSITEJ Artistic Gathering in Serbia.
This year’s ASSITEJ Artistic Gathering (2023) is being hosted in Southeastern Europe (Serbia) for the first time ever, and since the beginning of last week events, performances, discussions and all sorts of meetings and networks have been unravelling in Belgrade to start with and Novi Sad.
At the event, all ForesTeen project partners gathered for the first public presentation as well as the initial gathering of some of the teenagers participating in the project.
Within the framework of the project, an international conference “Children and Youth`s Right to Culture and Arts” was organized at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade on November 20th, the World Day of the Child, where Cristina Cazzola, Project Manager of ForesTEEN, presented the idea, methodology and objectives of the project in front of the most relevant local and international colleagues and stakeholders.
Cristina Cazzola, Project Manager of ForesTEEN
Following the conference, a live kick-off meeting of the ForesTEEN project was held with the more than 20 members of the ForesTEEN consortium who attended the meeting and grasped the opportunity to get to know each other better, as well as the local cultural scene for teenagers.
The members of the ForesTEEN consortium included 8 teenage participants from Italy, Denmark and Germany who established first connections and exchanges with 16 teenagers from Serbia who were taking part in the ASSITEJ Artistic Gathering.
As part of their programme, the ForesTEEN teenagers watched several performances of the Artistic Gathering.
As part of the project, a questionnaire was distributed in the Artistic Gathering:
Melissa Hekkers is a freelance journalist and author.
Her most recent book, Amir’s Blue Elephant, a creative non-fiction based on her experiences working in the Moria refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece and Cyprus. In 2018, she launched the My Cyprus Mandala Series, colouring books inspired by the natural and cultural heritage of Cyprus. In 2007, she published her first children’s book in both English and Greek entitled Crocodile, which won the Cyprus State Illustration Award. In 2012, she launched her second children’s book Flying across Red Skies (in English and Greek), using an experimental approach to literature, for which she was nominated for the Cyprus State Literary award. Her third, similarly well-received children’s book was Pupa (Greek and English), published in 2014 and was adapted as a theatre play in 2019. In between her last two books, she published her first free-verse poetry book entitled Come-forth. In 2019 she was contributing author to the anthology Nicosia Beyond Barriers: Voices from a Divided City, published by Saqi Books, London.
