We went to Prague to talk about planning for this conference. The conference is being led by Inventura learning disability arts organisation based in Prague, Czech Republic. We are one of the partners who will be working together to put this exciting event together.

We arrived in Prague on Tuesday the 2nd March in the evening. Marketa, one of the people from Inventura, met us at the airport and showed us to our hotel.

The next day we went to the Meet Factory where Inventura have their studio. We had to cross a live railway track to get there – dodging the trains – this was both funny and exciting. There were two red porches painted red and hanging on the outside of the building and a pink tank on the grass! The building was quite arty and I liked it. It used to be a factory and has now been converted to lots of artists studios, gallery and performance space. It was a great space – I wish we had it in Brighton. The council should do something about it!

We started off having coffee and meeting Peter and Gregor from ABM in Munich, Germany – they make TV programmes with disability themes – they also run The Way We Live Now Festival that is about disability, too. We also met Francesco, a film maker from Italy – he works for the Regional Government there.

Then we all did presentations about our work and  asked each other questions about what we all did. People were very interested in our Oska Bright Film Festival, the Shut Up And Listen Radio Show and how it got started, the Blue Camel Club and our bands – we played them some of the tracks from the Beat Express, “Rockstars”. It was really interesting to learn more about Inventura, their different ways of working, and the problems they are having getting their Government to recognise learning disability arts. I hope that this conference will start changing the minds of these politicians and social service providers. 

Then we saw some films from ABM. It was interesting learning about the lives of disabled people in Germany, and there is a great band there called Honey Sweet and the 7-Ups. Francesco showed a fantastic film about people with learning disabilities in Sardinia who are Life Guards on the beach there – it was a film about their jobs. This was a very powerful film giving a positive message about learning disabled people in responsible jobs – it should be on TV!

The next day we all went back to the Meet Factory again. This time we talked about the conference. It will be a two day conference about Media Literacy. At the conference we will look at telling others about learning disability arts work. We think it will be good to invite people to give presentations and be part of discussions. 

We want the audience to be government members and social providers, as well as the general public and people with a learning disability.

The conference will be partly academic and partly showing artistic work. We will invite people to present papers and share their case studies.

From Carousel, we thought that we can give case study presentations about Oska Bright and Shut Up and Listen Radio Show. We want Beat Express to play, too. We will have to see if we can afford to do this.

The conference is in early September 2011 in Prague. Now I have to think of a name!

I enjoyed meeting lots of people from other different organisations from across Europe. I look forward to meeting them again and learning more. Watch this space!