Illuminating challenges

Amid an industrial area lying in Shenzhen's Longgang district, South China's Guangdong province, packed with factories and migrant workers' residences, the Green Rose Social Work Service Center is a second home to many female workers and their children.

Kids often spend time there after school, doing homework inside the center's little classroom, or playing in the activity space, filled with picture books, toys and a donated secondhand projector to watch movies on.

The organization was originally established as a platform to empower female migrant workers with artistic means of self-expression, and help them improve their living conditions — especially those suffering from occupation-related diseases, injuries or workplace discrimination.

Ding Dang, founder of Green Rose, used to be a migrant worker herself. She shared her life experiences and the organization's work at the opening forum of the 4th Luminous Festival, an annual event centered on the arts which aims to be inclusive of people from a variety of disadvantaged backgrounds.

In 2004, at the age of 16, Ding left her hometown, a small village in Tianshui, Gansu province, to work in one of the countless factories clustered around Shenzhen.

Though she never received tertiary education, she didn't give up on self-education, spending most of her spare time reading in the factory's library and in a nonprofit reading room serving the greater industrial zone, where she started working two years later to popularize labor laws and protect workers' rights.

She became an active member of the reading room's support group for women, and encountered many who, like her, had left their rural homes for work in the city at an early age in order to support their families.

"When we were in a private space, we could talk about our shared experiences of gender discrimination, but we couldn't talk about these problems once we left the room or when men were present," Ding says.

"I also realized that many people were researching female workers or writing about their stories, but we rarely get to know these women's true thoughts. I wanted to allow women workers to speak for themselves, instead of always being represented by others."

She believes that although women workers have huge potential, their personal development is often restricted due to a lack of resources.

Since 2012, she and a few like-minded people have been organizing events to celebrate female workers, usually on every International Women's Day at venues dedicated to laborers, including Shenzhen Baoan Labor Museum. There they perform songs, dances and plays crafted by female workers as vehicles for self-expression.

In 2015, she founded the Green Rose Social Work Service Center in Longgang district's Niushipu. Occasional events were not helping to establish a social network of the permanent kind, so she set up the organization in a highly industrialized area in order to draw in large numbers of migrant workers and their family members. Now, she did not have to seek them out. They could come to her.

Referencing official data from 2015, Ding says that Liuyue community, which Niushipu belongs to, covered 1,250 hectares and was home to around 100,000 people, but only 1,800 of them were native to Shenzhen; the majority were migrant workers.

Green Rose was founded with the core belief that female workers make important contributions to families and society. The organization works to build a safe, healthy and equal community.

Local female workers are encouraged to express themselves via cultural and artistic means, such as writing songs and plays to tell their own stories, and they also produce handmade products for the organization to earn extra income.

The organization has established a mutual support group that helps women who are going through difficult times and improves their living conditions, while popularizing social issues including gender-based violence, domestic violence, sex education and children's education.

"Children are now also a major part of our work. At first, we had to include children because if we wanted to engage women workers in these activities, they needed help in taking care of their children," Ding says.

"Later we found that, if we want to address social issues like gender equality, community solidarity and treatment of migrant workers, the future generations are the most likely to change for the better."

Apart from after-school care services and tutoring sessions, there are also specially designed art activities for the children, including a photography exhibition project that asks them to take pictures of the industrial area, and a play that allows them to express their feelings about migrancy.

By attending the 4th Luminous Festival, Ding hopes to raise awareness for the efforts taking place at Green Rose, and to demonstrate how women are supporting and empowering one another as well as their children in an outlying industrial community.

Ding was among the eight guest speakers from home and abroad at the festival's opening.

Themed on "technologies of the self", this year's festival took place in Beijing in late September with a forum via video conference. In addition, there were six film screenings and a series of workshops, co-hosted by cultural and art organization Body On & On and the Danish Cultural Center in Beijing.

The screenings include documentaries and dance projects that promote inclusiveness through artistic means, present the potential and creativity of marginalized communities, and challenge stereotypical conceptions of normality.

Jacob Nossell, a Danish entrepreneur, shared his experiences and reflections on growing up with cerebral palsy at the forum. Natural Disorder, a documentary centered on him, was screened at the festival.

Over the course of shooting the documentary, Nossell found that, by placing his disability in an artistic context, he was able to achieve greater understanding of himself, and hopes that the film will make it easier for everyone to address issues pertaining to disability and normality.

He also says that to forge interpersonal understanding, it is important to point out the commonality of human experience, such as the universal desire for a happy family and successful career, instead of treating people with disabilities as heroes or victims.

"The more we can understand each other and see through a disability someone has, the more understanding can be created between people," Nossell says.

This year's festival also included recurring dance-therapy workshops that offer classes for people living with dementia and their caregivers.

"At this year's festival, we invited practitioners who are bringing together different communities, discovering their true thoughts and creative power, as well as changing our cultural views and narratives," says Ge Huichao, founder of the festival and Body On & On.

"We hope, as cultural or nonprofit organizations, to take action in response to uncertainties, to connect communities, to address marginalized groups, and to convey their needs."