Like many things, Offscreen began with a journey. A journey of four friends, recently graduated from university, who decided they would embark upon a year-long creative exploration of the Middle East and its environs.

It was 2002, and with Yasmin, a soon-to-be beloved and battered Toyota pick-up, they travelled through Turkey, Iran, Kurdish Iraq, UAE, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt and finally reached Baghdad soon after the city fell in 2003.

They experienced many things – overwhelming kindness, hordes of young underground artists attempting social transformation, stunning landscapes, frustration, quirky and eccentric people, pompous border officials, hope and hunger for change, nocturnal transcendental ceremonies, good and bad coffee – but little correlated to the media images of the region back in the UK, as they had suspected, despite the volatile time period.

On returning to the UK, armed with their experiences, memories, artwork, photographs and scribbles, they established the Offscreen Education Programme in order that as many young people as possible from the UK could share in and experience what they had discovered the Middle East to be. Similarly, that young people from the Middle East could explore the UK and (hopefully) find more to it than cups of tea, football and people who talk about the rain.

Together they published a book of the journey – Offscreen: Four Young Artists in the Middle East – and also held exhibitions of their artwork in London, Amman, Muscat, New York, Amsterdam, Oslo and Tehran.

And so began Offscreen Expeditions, replicating on a smaller scale the journey they undertook to discover for themselves the jigsaw of people and places, in order to inspire students to explore other cultures and cross borders in a creative and positive way.

Creating life-changing expeditions for small groups of young people, although a good step, is somewhat limited in impact. What if those lucky few could be the eyes and ears of their peers, and share what they experienced with their class, school, town, country?

The ‘live’ youth expedition model was pioneered by Offscreen, where daily blogging, photo and video uploads to an expedition website meant that families, friends and schools could ‘follow’ the journey as it happened, as well as interact with the team – comment and ask them questions.

Not only that, but what if their experiences could be built into teaching materials that teachers can use after the expeditions come to an end?

Since the first expedition in 2007, from the UK to Oman and the UAE, Offscreen has produced numerous resources for schools both in the UK and abroad, including an interactive Classroom Media Player for English language learning, short films, lesson plans and activity sheets based on 2010’s Journey to Pakistan and Journey to the UK, packs of visual material for arts classrooms, and also run creative workshops around the UK.  

Offscreen's vision remains to inspire creativity and communication across borders, whatever they may be.