Platohedro

Platohedro is a creative community platform for communities in need of positive interpersonal change. Through collaborative pedagogy, artist residencies, and artistic infrastructure (including art supplies, production tools, and open source computer networks), Plato provides all generations— regardless of income level— with everything they need to improve their local community through art and leadership skills. As a non-profit organization and a collaborative creative platform based in Medellín, Platohedro believes that everyone deserves to hone the powers of creation and community healing.

In 2004, Platohedro was founded by Lina Mejía and Alexander Correa as an audio-visual collective that strived to bring film production to communities with low access to supplies. As digitization of production tools (like cameras) proliferated across Colombia, Platohedro continued to evolve into a community center, and in 2007, they started their Matinée program, a space to fulfill the creative needs of children. Today many of the children from the initial years of the Matinée program have become filmmakers and community leaders in their neighborhoods. Today, Platohedro hosts artists through their residency program, and has undertaken many pedagogical and collaborative initiatives like the Ideatory, a productive learning and brainstorming center for teenagers, and Poppies, which provides women with the psychosocial, digital literacy, and economic skills they need to improve their local conditions for themselves and their families.

At the core of their mission, Platohedro works to defend and promote human rights for all by preventing violence, encouraging youth and child participation and leadership, and incorporating a gendered persepcted into all their initiatives. They promote the exchange of knowledge and thoughts, based on respect and equity, and they propose more dignified and fair alternatives for people and familes in search of liberation through open access to knowledge, freedom of thought, and freedom of artistic practice. By working with grassroots communities and a great range of social ideologies and practices, Platohedro perpetually seeks collective well-being for entire neighborhoods, districts, and for the global greater society. At their core, Platohedro is a proposition of the construction and appreciation of all that is common.