Liberi Ludi supports projects of cultural adaptation and social integration for children through art and creativity. We see our task as building a bridge between three groups: the European institutions (both international and local) working with children in migration; the artists, educators and cultural organisations who want to take part in this work, whether as individuals or through their organisations; and the children themselves.

We pursue this in three ways.

First, we are building a community of artists and educators ready to take part in this work. The Liberi Ludi Creative Space, hosted on liberiludi.com, is the digital home of this community.

Second, we provide them with the resources they need to work with children: pedagogical literature, methodological guides, and ready-made session kits. We commission the content of these kits, both physical and digital, primarily from artists who themselves have lived experience of migration.

We have also developed our own method, Read, Cut & Film: a five-step creative cycle in which children read a story together, talk it through, draw and cut out their own characters and backgrounds, and shoot a short stop-motion animation. One story takes one to two sessions, and at the end each child becomes the author of their own film and presents it to an audience of peers.

Third, we establish partnerships with schools, summer camps, and after-school programmes, while also working with cultural institutions and refugee reception services in Belgium and across Europe.

Our practice is informed by twentieth-century play theory and constructionist pedagogy (Huizinga, Vygotsky, Bruner, Papert, the Reggio Emilia approach), and by current European frameworks of psychosocial support, digital wellbeing, and children's cultural rights. We set this out in detail on our Methodology and Foundations pages.