Amateo Award Finalists 2021

PAMIS, promoting a more inclusive society, is the only charity that solely supports children, young people and adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) and their families to lead healthy, valued and included lives doing the things they want to do within their community. They offer a range of projects and programmes including our multi-sensory storytelling and performance work with the volunteer arts collective The Arts End of Somewhere. 

Drama Express provides young people with complex disabilities the opportunity to access the performing arts within Cornwall. Drama Express aims to end the isolation of many young people with complex disabilities, linking the benefits of drama to maintaining positive mental health. Through nurturing the individual talents of its members, Drama Express recognizes the importance of creating, developing and sustaining peer group friendships through a shared experience of drama.

Volksgarten: from rejection to dream spot: In the summer of 2020, maiz made an intervention at the “Volksgarten” park in Linz, Austria. It was an initiative of the self-organized association maiz, in cooperation with Sounding Linz. The project proposes a navigation through a transcultural space that from a hegemonic perspective is often seen as an area of conflict. Unemployed, migrants and refugees are present at Volksgarten from spring to autumn, representing a social class, which finds no hearing in society. In this walk, maiz proposes a reading of this space through the convergence of sound and imagination. At the end, through the multiple re-enactment of this walk, participants became part of a shared space.

In response to the Coronavirus pandemic, Toonspeak created three distinct but complementary projects to support the incredibly vulnerable young people throughout the city of Glasgow through: Creative Calm, Access to Digital Creativity and Projects by Post. In launching this response programme, the group wanted to maintain critical relationships with the young people and within Toonspeak’s community, to support digital creativity and to support the wellbeing and mental health of the young people.

People come to Europe from all over the world in search of a new life. This is particularly evident in Brussels. To celebrate this diversity and welcome asylum seekers, poet and author, Sarah Reader Harris, and musician and songwriter, Marieke Slovin Lewis created “On the Move: Poems and Songs of Migration”, a participatory arts project for creative and cultural exchange between longtime residents of Belgium and those who have just arrived.