4

For Whom? The Project’s Audience

theory

The second key question we need to answer is — for whom are we making the project? You’d agree, there’s a difference: whether we are sending a message to victims of a conflict to provide them with psychological support and inform them about rehabilitation opportunities, or we want to influence the regulation of situations, and our recipient should be legislative bodies.

It is very important to imagine in detail what kind of person will become a viewer of our project: where they live, what their habits are, what they do and are interested in, what they are looking for and striving for. With knowledge about the key audience categories, we will be able to correctly choose the language and style of the content and, most importantly, the product’s form and promotion channel.

Let’s imagine that the project’s audience is elderly people living in rural areas. A suitable channel would be a series of documentary short films on television. A completely unsuitable format would be an interactive application for mobile devices.

choosing a suitable channel for communication with it;

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creating a suitable form for the project, both in terms of narrative language and style;

planning and calculating possible resonances after the project's publication and the risks from them;

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devising and organizing a communication strategy and stages of project promotion.

example

This project tells the stories of girls who are married off against their will. We see photographs from several countries where this problem is relevant—Ethiopia, Nepal, Afghanistan, India. Try to analyze the audience of this project. Who is this project aimed at, whom does it encourage, and to what action?

theory

4.1.1

Typologies of Viewers

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Society as the environment in which the conflict is occurring or has occurred.

Government bodies that can influence the outcome of the conflict situation.

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Passive, active, and potential "observers."

Potential victims, people at risk.

Indirect and direct participants in conflict situations.

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Victims of conflicts, social inequality, discrimination.

example

The Stolen Memory project, through the stories it tells of victims of Nazi concentration camps, not only documents history through digital media but, with a high-quality, professional, and effective presentation of the material, gathers a community around the project to search for and return items confiscated by the Nazis to the victims' families.

nteraction with a foundation that has not only a charitable but also an educational function aimed at preventing the trafficking of girls.

#potential victims

Virtual reality helps one feel inside a tense situation and evoke empathy for the main character.

#indirect and direct participants in conflicts

The project The People vs. Rubber Bullets actively raises the question of the ethics and humanity of law enforcement's use of kinetic impact projectiles as an alternative to firearms.

#passive, active, and potential "observers"

Love Radio is a transmedia documentary project about the reconciliation process in Rwanda after the genocide. It tells the story of Musekeweya — "New Dawn," a popular radio series created to prevent new outbreaks of violence.

#society as the environment in which a conflict is occurring or has occurred

After the project's films revealed the truth, legislative acts in some countries were changed.

#government bodies of the country where the conflict is unfolding

theory

4.2

The P2P Approach
(person to person)

Building communication with the audience should follow all the principles of live, personal interaction—as if one person were talking to another. It is not the product that speaks to the person, but you, as the author or a collective of authors, addressing the viewer through the project. Therefore, it is important to devirtualize the tone and experience of communication as much as possible. It is this that creates trust, depth of perception, and the possibility of being heard.

ram case

"Letters to God" Exhibition

One of the most difficult tasks of this project was to present a religious theme in a secular cultural space, where the unstated agenda is a pronounced neutrality on matters of faith. We understood that the exhibition could attract viewers with completely different positions: from free-spirited urban youth actively demonstrating atheistic views, to practicing Christians and Muslims. We faced a difficult task—to create an exhibition environment where all these types of audiences could feel comfortable, without facing alienation or devaluation.

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The approach to the texts and interviews with the exhibition's protagonists allowed us to build a unified value field in communication. The figurative starting point was an episode from a documentary film where a postman from Jerusalem, who specializes in delivering notes to the Wailing Wall, fulfills the requests of those who cannot come to the Holy Land in person. We imagined a large sack of notes—in them, the fears, requests, and joys of many people. If you randomly pull out these notes, it is impossible to determine the denomination of their author. From this metaphor, the communicative model for the "Letters to God" exhibition grew.

In the end, all three potential audience groups—non-religious viewers and viewers of different religions—were able not only to watch with engagement but also to take part in the dialogue. Viewers left their own "letters," thereby expanding the exhibition space and making it personal.

method

The project began with a series of work meetings where we tried to understand how one could talk about conflicts through everyday objects. Together, we analyzed how such things could become an interface for a conversation about displacement, loss, and memory. At that time, we had neither a name nor a final theme, but it was in these objects that the future project—"Things in Common"—was already being born.

In the end, "Things in Common" is an exhibition and research project about conflicts that leave a mark on personal belongings. At the center of each story is an object and the fate of its owners: families who were forced to leave their homes, move, escape, or adapt to a new environment. We explore how everyday objects hold the memory of separation, relocation, reconciliation, or the impossibility of speaking. The project combines archival and fieldwork, a scientific perspective and an artistic view, turning a thing into a mediator between the past and the present.

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