gms | German Medical Science

Casa Enjambre is formed by a group of women who offer their artistic, cultural and environmental tools to the community. They carry out recreational and educational activities to create safe public spaces for meaningful learning, with a focus on popular education for children and youth.

We develop our project in the Lo Hermida borough, in the city of Santiago. This neighborhood, since its origin in the 70s, is confronted with inequitable rights of disposition and access to basic social services (educational facilities, health care, political decision-making spaces) and is considered at risk areas for flooding. Lo Hermida deals with very high rates of population density with the lack of social opportunities, which leads to drug trafficking and violence. It has few safe public spaces for recreation, with few green areas.

The relevance of our work in Lo Hermida increased, especially during the social protests starting in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the greater inequality. The suspension of schools for almost two years led to many mental health problems. The state institutions are not guarantors of access to mental health and safe public spaces.

In the Urban Health Transdisciplinary Forum Inger Heine, biologist, and Ph.D.(c) in ecology, environmental educator, and Javiera Mella, psychopedagogue, will present how our multiple strategies of socio-educational intervention makes visible practices of domination (e.g. gender relations) and class division, as well as other possible forms of popular knowledge that can empower children, youth, and families, for instance, to perceive inequalities related to health and environment as a structural problem. Inger and Javiera are popular educators, who link academic knowledge with the territory. In addition to being inhabitants of the territory, developing several educational activities.

Our presentation will focus on one of our transdisciplinary activities, which we organized together with photographers from the Arcos Professional Institute: the documentary photography workshop. The main goal was the expression of the identity of young people between 12 and 18 years through their personal history, daily life and relationship with their environment. Photography is then a means of artistic expression, where the look of the world is valued from their perspective, and they generate archival material, which is essential for the memory and history that we build as a society. In the workshops, we discussed the photos with the participants in relation to questions of structural exclusion and created practices of care as well as relationships of collaborative to understand and reflect on how to change education and health inequities and gendered, classist and environmental injustices. We will present (PowerPoint with videos and a poster) the project modules and results, as well as the different actors with whom we have cooperated.