Hello Project Online

Hello Project Online is a radically inclusive art-making project that has been undertaken in the city of Chuncheon, South Korea since 2019 by an ensemble of people with a diverse range of experiences of disability.

Opportunities to participate in the arts are often inaccessible to people living with disability. Participation in inclusive arts activity improves the health and wellbeing of participants by offering social connections, self-expression, physical activity and an opportunity to be proud of their own stories. Hello Project Online creates powerful and transformative participatory images, narratives and models to inspire change and social and ecological engagement. This research focuses on employing open-ended, responsive methods of working in order to break down hierarchies and challenge dominant structures. Originally designed as a performance-making project, Hello Project shifted online in 2020 due to COVID-19 and is hosted at http://www.helloproject.online

The Hello Project Online process: Encourages the development of relationships and collaboration between people who are different to each other; Is bilingual, delivered in Korean and English; Encourages artists to present their own stories and lived experiences to each other and to audiences; Allows artists to self-determine their content, and how they’re represented; Is flexible, gentle, and challenging all at once.

The significance of this research is in the way it extends on the transcultural working practices developed by Company Bad since 2011 by fostering conditions of possibility for personal, social, political and ecological transformation, and engendering power for those whose voices and histories have been historically marginalised.