Community arts and health promotion: a case study in a photography workshop in "Ciudad Oculta" (Hidden City), the shanty town Nº 15 of the City of Buenos Aires

https://doi.org/10.18294/sc.2009.239

Published 4 December 2009 Open Access


Gabriela Wald Magister en Educación, Promoción de la Salud y Desarrollo Internacional, Institute of Education, University of London. Estudiante de Doctorado en Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina



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Keywords:

Health Promotion, Photography, Poverty Areas, Adolescent, Argentina

Abstract


This article analyzes the potentials of community art to promote health and wellbeing among young people living in vulnerable social contexts in Latin America. Through a case-study, we aim at providing elements for the theoretical and methodological debate of a central problem in health promotion: the distance between its rhetoric, based on a wide conception of health -understood as a collective process, influenced by social, economic, environmental and cultural issues- and the interventions that have been carried out in our region, organized around disease concepts that respond to individualistic theoretical approaches. The selected case is ph15, a photography workshop delivered by a group of photographers in the shanty town Nº 15 "Ciudad Oculta" ("Hidden City") of the City of Buenos Aires. The study shows that young people notice individual and collective changes as a result of participating in this workshop, and these changes could be linked to the wide concept of health. Therefore, an activity that has not been thought to promote health can help us to design activities that are closer to the philosophy of health promotion.