Empowering migrant women through design

Resilience of women

Our collaboration with IRES Piemonte began in February 2020, before the pandemic started. The objective? To design a communication strategy for ALFa to tell the story of resilient migrant women while steering clear of stereotypes and cliches. How did we it? We combined a participatory photography project with a digital storytelling website and an exhibition.

So maaaaaaany materials collected, and then?

Once we realised we did not have stories or emotions to feed our narrations, we designed an instant-camera-based participatory photography workshop to collect them. In collaboration with photographer Claudia Corrent and journalist Clara Attene, we set up three workshops in three different places, which allowed us to assemble new points of view and insight impossible to get through traditional interview approaches.

Hundreds of instant pictures, vocals, and thoughts... how to narrate them? We set up a scrollytelling story that presents all the collected material through a chapter based navigation that combines insights, instant-pictures and digital photos. Each chapter focuses on single details of the women everyday life: learning Italian, housing, self-confidence, passions, the future, etc. (photo by Vittorio Iandolino, courtesy of Circolo del Design).

Going transmedia!

Using the material we collected, we created a transmedia communication strategy. What does it mean? It implies giving birth to a distributed form of storytelling, something that's developed both online and in a physical space, offering different entry points to different audiences. With the photos taken by Claudia and the women's verbal input collected and collated by Clara, we also created an exhibition in Turin.

The Circolo del Design exhibition - It allowed us to show local citizens who the women involved in the ALFa project are and what they think - women who live within the community, but often remain unknown. The exhibition contextualised the women as both the protagonists of the images and the authors of the images. The subject and the object of the exhibition at the same time.