Context
There is a need to think about youth art work in rural areas. Youth work organisations that focus on arts education are mostly absent in rural contexts, and are concentrated in urban areas instead. In this paper, we will address this by presenting a new “research in practice” project, funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ programme, in which various youth work organisations are investigating the value of ethnographic documentary making as a creative tool for bringing rural youth art work in the spotlight. We are working together with several other organisations in Europe. These are three organisations that work with youngsters: Limerick Youth Service in Ireland, Asociatia Curba de Cultură in Romania, Theaterhuis Mals Vlees in Belgium. Lastly, the umbrella organisation ECYC (European Confederation of Youth Clubs) is contributing to the dissemination of the project once the first documentaries are ready. Currently, we are in the first of two years of the project, which we have named Rural Youth Cinema.

Rationale
 Whereas the use and value of other ethnographic methods in arts education and youth work (such as ethno-fictive writing, or using drawing as an ethnographic method) have been well established in academic literature, ethnographic video documentary has received relatively little academic attention so far. After all, it has only been in recent years that video making has become so accessible and widely available, especially to younger populations. With smartphone cameras getting increasingly more advanced with each year, and video platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok still on the rise, many youngsters have already been in contact with video content, both as consumers and creators. While in previous years, documentary making was not a financially feasible medium to work with in most youth clubs, nowadays the youngsters themselves already come fully equipped.     

Goals and research questions
The aim of the Erasmus+ project Rural Youth Cinema is to scrutinise audio-visual, ethnographic documentation as a means of highlighting the importance of arts education and youth work in rural regions, and moreover to explore its potential as a flexible and open creative outlet that is empowering for youngsters in all kinds of populations. To that end, together with the various partners throughout Europe, we are developing a qualitative methodology that guides young people in making ethnographic documentaries. Although several guides for documentary making that are aimed at youngsters certainly exist, these are usually only focussed on technical elements, such as camera settings, use of artificial light, camera angles and editing techniques. While these are important aspects which, when learned, can boost artistic expression, it is our goal to also study the educative and communicative effects of documentary making with youngsters. What does it mean to make documentaries with young, sometimes disadvantaged, people? How can documentary making promote and contribute to other arts education youth work activities? And above all, how can these documentaries be used to open up debates about the significance and sustainability of rural youth work and arts education?

For this project, we have opted to use a flexible methodology, on the one hand to pragmatically accommodate for the differences in the ways the various organisations operate, but more importantly we wish to consider this project as an explorative and fundamental study on the value of ethnographic documentary in youth work, in which the specific results and recommendations were still unknown at the start of the project. What was clear from the start, however, was the choice to focus on ethnography as a broad direction for the documentaries to adopt. As with ethnographic or ethno-fictive writing, ethnographic documentary making has the ability to not just give a voice to the author/documentary makers, but to give prominence to this voice (or voices) within the local environment. The makers (i.e. the youngsters) are on camera themselves, as they are moving and interacting in their community. As such, the documentary making is not just a creative practice, but one that visualises the relations between the artistic medium itself (video documentary) and the context, environment and day-to-day work in which it takes place. In the first phase of this project, we put the emphasis on experimentation and learning of filming techniques. As our youth is familiar with smartphones, we chose to embrace a certain DIY approach, starting off with very short videos as fragments of a videographic diary. These first experiments then serve as the inspiration for the making of more full-fledged documentaries in the second phase. In total, six documentaries will be made, which will be shown and distributed in the three participating countries. Following from these documentaries, a qualitative guide will be developed in which the various challenges and opportunities for such a documentary project are discussed. As such, the activities and the documentary work done by the various partners can be seen as test case studies, in which both practical and artistic elements of documentary making are mapped and analysed. Underlying all objectives and questions is the desire to create synergies between the various approaches in youth work and ethnographic documentary making, and to use this hands-on project as an explorative study of the medium’s potential.

As the various case studies are still ongoing and the qualitative guide is yet to be developed, our conclusions and results are merely surmising and preliminary in nature. That being said, we can already see the great potential of this video ethnographic methodology. First of all, like photography, videography has a certain directness as one only has to press ‘record’, and content creation has started. As such, it can be a more adaptive artistic form, requiring less planning and instead allowing for reacting to more ephemeral elements (i.e., whatever happens to be taking place in front of the camera). Yet, with the focus on ethnography the makers are also forced to consider their own position, their agency and their relation to the subjects they are documenting. From an arts educative perspective, this combination can be very interesting, as the medium is both outward-looking and introspective, both creative and reflective. What is more, we have the belief that through this documentary practice, issues that otherwise stay invisible can be revealed. Each of the organisations performing the first video experiments in the first phase, seek to address local issues in the second phase. For example, Limerick Youth Service found that in their day-to-day work they were confronted with the tensions between the settled community and the travellers in Limerick, and through this video documentation, with interviews and reflections, they used this project as a step towards building bridges. In similar fashion, the youth organisation Asociatia Curba de Cultură addressed the conservative school system in rural Romania through interviews with local youth. As such, this project has the potential of drawing attention to various important themes in youth work and education, such as the sustainability and ecology of rural youth work at large, and the documentation of youth art projects.

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