As I stood in the departure halls of the Melbourne International Airport I felt a great sense of achievement. After 32 years of isolation I was finally leaving Australia to explore the world. It was going to be a fantastic trip that would allow me to experience many new places and cultures for the first time. Departing Australia I knew who I was and how I fitted into the world. I was comfortable with my own identity and what it meant for me to be an active participant in society. I felt safe and secure. I had my camera. I took a photo of myself and posted it to my Facebook profile.
The reason for this trip was to attend a community media festival and conference in the West African capital of Ghana, Accra, which was being hosted by the OURMedia network. It was their 7th, with previous events having been hosted in Australia, India, Brazil, Columbia, Spain and America. Founded in 2001, OURMedia is an emerging global network with the goal of facilitating a long-term dialogue between academics, activists, practitioners and policy experts around citizens’ media initiatives.
For the festival, I coordinated a collaborative project between my students—from the Bachelor of Design (Communication Design) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University—and members of the OURMedia network. The brief requested participants to complete a range of simple tasks that explored themes the conference was to address, including ‘Identity, Inclusion and Innovation’. The tasks required participants to explore the following themes: creativity through typographic experimentation, collage, letraset, omnicrom and handwriting.
