OUR VISION

The Visbility for Transformation Lab (VIFT)’s vision is to foster social transformative change emerging from creative and innovative transdisciplinary processes. We believe that collaborating with experts, artists, local professionals from different disciplines and regions around the world using visual and immersive technologies as well as new research methodologies has a strong potential to support memorialization processes and violence prevention mechanisms. VIFT considers creative action and empathy to be key tools for paving the way for a shift in perspectives that triggers rehumanization processes and the reclamation of dignity.

OUR MISSION

VIFT’s mission is to research, develop, and carry out new ways of understanding and translating memorialization processes and violence prevention mechanisms through the use of transdisciplinary approaches. Concretely, VIFT aims to:

Merge situated knowledge, academic research, practitioner-based expertise, and visual methods as well as diverse artistic and digital methods through collaboration and partnerships with international, local, grassroots organizations, and individual experts with diverse skill sets, in order to strengthen and support violence prevention and memorialization processes;

VIFT aims to prevent further cycles of violence and conflict by supporting communities in restoring their social fabric and creating an environment of trust and engagement, allowing for rehumanization processes to emerge as well as to strengthen accountability mechanisms VIFT uses:

Filmmaking and diverse immersive digital technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR);
Ethnographic reflexive filmmaking methods;
Expressive artistic mediums (dance, music, and sound design).

OUR VALUES

VIFT’s work is based on values of solidarity, respect, empathy, and collaboration. We believe that everyone should be aware and able to claim their agency and dignity with no dependence on external support, yet, in the face of entrenching violence and inequalities, we are certain of our collective responsibility in opening ‘spaces’ where this can be achieved. VIFT, thus, strives to raise awareness and support this process through its work.

Based on feminist ontologies of positionality, we always acknowledge our position and we remain mindful that each lived experience has its own unique intersection of forms of oppression. VIFT works through this intersectional approach, placing dignity, human rights and mutual respect for culture and beliefs at the forefront of our work and values.

We are dedicated to never letting ego, competition or greed for power get in the way of our fundamental values and beliefs. We do not simply stand in solidarity with the people who are being impacted by global inequality and violence, but we walk alongside them supporting their needs and actions.