This paper is a contribution coming form the experience of a five days Youth Forum “Water and Intercultural Dialogue”, one of the actions of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, realized in Turin form 20 to 25 of may of 2008 and organized by the Anna Lindth Fundation for Dialogue Between Culture. The main aim of the Forum was to raise the youth's role in building better understanding and pacific co-existence between Euro-Mediterranean peoples and to promote inter-Mediterranean dialogue around the theme of water, focusing it in three areas: a) Water, Heritage and Intergenerational Dialogue; b) Water, Spirituality and Emotion; c) Water, Sustainable Development and Civil Society. As observer participant I had the possibility to be deeply involved in the process and to experiment in myself the difficulties and the richness of the project. Inter-crossing the experience with previous theoretical and practical background (researches about “Islamic art in Granada”, “Tunisian Cinema and Intercultural Education”, “Art Workshops for Integration”) I developed an auto-ethnography that has as main aim to offer a critical analysis and feedback of a practical experience that risks, as may others no-formal educational experience, to end without any follow up. The output project of the group of “Water, Spirituality and Emotion”, in which I was involved, was to realize a public performance, using sound, music, imagines, and bodies, around the theme of water between a group of 23 no professional young people form Euro-Mediterranean countries. Three professional, two from the field of theatre and a visual artist, followed the process and gave the input necessary for the realization. To deal with cultural and linguistic diversity, short time and lack of experience on the stage of the participant, where the most important challenge. Understanding education as the “construction and re-construction of personal and social history” (Clandinin and Connelly, 1995) the stage gave the possibility of create a narration avoiding the difference of language and using bodies, music and imagines. Main innovative points of the process were: a) Use of art for dealing with the difference and re-thinking identities; b) The role of educator as mediator and coordinator, while everybody was invited to share his/her skills and competences; c) Creation of a learning and productive environment, spending time for knowing one each other, for relaxing and for feel confident in ourselves; d) The intensity of the experience through a five days/24 hours for day living together

The research method is based in participatory observation of the five days workshop and to the development of an auto-ethnography (Russel, 1999). The ethnological methods, historically linked with anthropological research about cultural difference (Malinowsky, 1922), acquire in this methodology a focus on the subjectivity of the researcher, that is no more considered as an “neutral observer” but as someone that “understands his or her personal history to be implicated in a larger social formations and historical processes” (Russel, 1999). Moreover auto-ethnography is a methodology linked to narrative inquiry and for this reason is especially interesting on the one hand for dealing with identities, that is the narration that we create about ourselves, and on the other to give a full report of complex educational process as the intercultural, where the space of feeling, emotions, often semi-conscious, is predominant.

To realize an intercultural education project dealing namely with another issue, in this case water, permit to step out form an intercultural education that stereotypes cultures and works with abstract concept as “European” or “Muslim”. Instead this process aim to create a dialogue between individual people, each of whom express and relate him/her self through a dialogical relationship with a cultural, linguistic, religious frame. Culture are not abstract concept but people that embodied and relate themselves with cultural frame and input (Bruner, 1984 ). Don’t working directly with cultural issues, which is the strategy of this project, permit to avoid direct confrontation and let the people more free to express themselves. Moreover the place of stage is deeply symbolical and could be considerate as an “in – between spaces” (Bhabha, 1994) where people can experiment themselves and elaborating different strategies of selfhood that permit them to deal with the difference.