YOUSOUND Zine 4: Drawing Movement to Raise Questions

YouSound is a social science research project that studies symphonic music education organizations centred on the inclusion of minor migrants and refugees in Europe – www.yousound.eu

We have chosen two organisations in different countries to serve as case studies: the Dream Orchestra in Sweden, and El Sistema Greece. In 2022 and 2023, we are visiting both countries, applying ethnographic methods to better grasp the complexity of interactions between multicultural human beings in these music
education contexts.

Welcome to the fourth and final YouSound Zine! The two first issues were focused on the Dream Orchestra in Gothenburg, Sweden; the two final zines are about our ethnographic experience at El Sistema Greece in Athens. Beatriz Machado, the team’s ethnographic illustrator, has spent a month and a half observing music classes in multicultural neighbourhoods and at the Schisto Refugee Camp.

Illustrating such complex and volatile realities has proven to be demanding for the eye that tries to see beyond the obvious and for the hand that tries to picture the subtleties of interactions. Clearly, such illustrations are subjective, even personal.
For these zines, I have asked Beatriz to accompany her drawings with her own words, making it a sort of ethnographic diary, in the hope that these two methods of communication – drawings and words – may be complementary and inclusive. Such a mix is risky: words might close off what could be left open by the drawn lines; illustrations might fix what could be more poetic between the written lines. YouSound Zines aim at being inclusive, stretching the communication tools of the social sciences through artistic ways of seeing and expressing.

When paying attention to the illustrations in the four fanzines, questions are raised. Each interrogation is nurtured by what is seen and by who sees, when and from where. Such attention to relativism, in its question form, may serve as a good basis to begin analysing the intricacies of what is being done by Dream Orchestra, by El Sistema Greece, and by the YouSound Research Project too, by taking a reflexive perspective.

We wish to thank all those who have engaged with us in both countries for opening our minds to new questions, to the pragmatism they practise daily for survival, and to social complexity.