Our Exhibition ¨Our Community and Our Superheroes¨

Welcome to the online exhibtion of ¨Nuestra Comunidad y Nuestros Superhéroes¨! 

Here at Club de Arte in Guayaquil the whole of August has been dedicated to preparing for and setting up this exhibition, ¨Our Communtiy and Our Superheroes¨, to show and celebrate all of the fantastic work produced by our JUCONI kids over the last 6 month of CMAP workshops. 

After the weeks of preparation and planning in the office, with a steady flow of volunteers to help out with mounting, joining and fixing all the individual bits of work into larger pieces, we were finally ready to mobilize last Monday. We loaded the work vans and headed to the exhibition space at the prestigious Museo Nahim Isaías in the centre of Guayaquil near the Malecón 2000.

And after two intensive days of pinning, hanging and arranging, with yet more volunteer helpers involved, we were ready for the grand opening on the afternoon of Wednesday 20th August. At 3pm we officially ´unveiled´ and welcomed the children and families from our Club de Arte group in Sergio Toral to the museum, along with JUCONI staff, volunteers and guests.

Guest speakers included; Señora Mariana Roldos, the Vice President of the board of Directors of JUCONI, Señora Dalia Palomeque, a representative of the government body Ministerio de Inclusión Económica y Social MIES, who support JUCONI´s work financially, and Martha Espinoza our Director here at JUCONI. The speakers congratulated the children on their work within Club de Arte and also thanked the children´s families for working together with JUCONI for a positive future for themselves and their children.

These opening speeches were also my opportunity to introduce the content of the exhibition, to speak about CMAP´s objectives in working with art with the children who attend Club de Arte and to thank the children for their participation, imagination and creativity. Our most special speaker was one of our regular art club attendees, 12 year old Mirco from Sergio Toral, who told the audience what materials and techniques he and the other children have been using throughout our workshops.

An exciting touch to the day was that a reporter and film crew from Canal RTS filmed all of the opening speeches and then moved through into the exhibition space to interview the MIES and JUCONI representatives as well as two of the older children who have attended Club de Arte. We are waiting for a copy of the resulting news report and will share it as soon as it comes through. Here´s hoping that this helps to carry the message about JUCONI and CMAP´s work further afield to new and supportive ears.

Our celebrations continued through to the end of the week, as we welcomed the children and parents from our group in Nueva Prosperina to the exhibition space on Thursday and then those from Socio Vivienda 2 on Friday. It was a real delight to see the kids´ reactions to seeing their work presented in the museum and to meet some of their mothers and fathers and see their pride as they photographed their children with their work.

Proud mums from Nueva Prosperina:

Now that you know about all the activities from last week, let us guide you through a virtual tour of the exhibition space:

Looking back over the last 6 months the children´s work can be divided into two large themes: ¨Our Community¨and ¨Our Superheroes¨.

  

 

¨Our Community¨ includes all the projects from February to May where the children focused on creating personalized pieces such as puppets, hands and gardens, that joined together to create collaborative group pieces such as ¨Our Puzzle¨ and ¨Our Peace Park.¨ These were the workshops where I co-facilitated alongside our much loved and missed CMAP volunteer Jonny Browning.

¨Our Puzzle¨ Each child created a personalized puzzle piece that joined together into large group piece representing their community. In the gallery space we used Jonny, Ronald, Blanca and my pieces to connect the three groups into one giant Club de Arte puzzle.

Jonny and I chose the theme of ´community´ to open with in February 2014 because at that time two of our groups were completely new to Club de Arte, Sergio Toral and Socio Vivienda 2, and although the third was continuing from 2013, half of the children were new. Our aims with these projects were for the children to feel safe and welcome in the space and community of Club de Arte, to create bonds between themselves and with us as facilitators, and to offer them the opportunity to create individual pieces representing themselves and to then see their pieces contribute to a collective whole symbolizing their community.

 
   

¨Our Peace Park¨, the central piece of the community-themed projects: the three groups´parks were arranged at different levels using bricks and display bases. Three trees filled with the children´s ¨hands of values¨ stood alongside, and white and black clouds hung above, decorated with the children's ideas of what they like and don´t like in Club de Arte. The parks themselves are made up of shoe-box gardens that the children created as safe and happy places for their little puppet and animal figures. 

 
 


   
 
   

In the second half of the exhibition space ¨Our Superheroes¨ showcased the superhero and super-heroine designs and costumes that the children created in the 9 sessions of Club de Arte from May to July. The aim with this theme was to encourage the children to reflect on their own strengths and abilities through their imagined superhero characters. As the grande-finale to the project the children donned their costumes and filmed individual portraits introducing their superhero with their superpower, weak point and mission, and then filmed group stories of confrontation with their archenemies that end in the superheroes´ victory. 

   

 

 

 

   

The number of children that come to any given Club de Arte workshop varies, with the usual being an average of 16 and over the last 6 months Ronald, Blanca, Jonny and I have worked with over 100 children in total. For the superheroes project this meant that we had MANY bits and pieces of costumes to display, and in order to be able to include every piece by every child we chose a few different ways to display the work. 

We picked 12 complete costumes to display individually (see the photos below) and with all the remaining pieces constructed the three large Super-figures in the photos above, representing from left to right (in the photo they all appear in) Sergio Toral, Nueva Prosperina and Socio Vivienda 2. These figures were put together in the JUCONI office by myself and volunteers including some teenagers from Nueva Prosperina. Their bodies are covered in the children´s superhero-logo t-shirts, and their huge capes are patchworks of the individual capes, dotted with individual masks. Their super-tools are laid by their feet and their super-shields hung around their heads.

 

 

 

    

Some of the individual superhero weapons, capes, masks and shields were also displayed on posters explaining the whole process of the project, plus all the remaining designs, background drawings and photos were put together into two giant books. Both the posters and the books were hugely popular with the kids who love spotting photos of themselves and their brothers, sisters and friends:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  By far the star attraction of the exhibition was the children´s superhero video ¨Nuestros Superhéroes¨. It was absolutely brilliant to watch the children´s excitement at seeing themselves projected large on the wall alongside their superhero characters, and to hear them laugh, shout and giggle out loud. The reaction of one particularly difficult-to-reach child was especially heartwarming, as his usual defensiveness was replaced by excitement and laughter as he watched himself dancing onscreen.: Watch ¨Our Superheroes¨ here on YouTube:

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

A final way of presenting the superhero costumes, and the final and most interactive display of the exhibition were these two life-sized fair-ground ´put-your-face-in-the-hole-for-a-photograph´figures which the children had a lot of fun being photographed behind:  

There were MANY people involved in making this exhibition a reality:  

Thank you to Guisella Moreno and Jorge Chavez at the Museo Nahim Isaías for gifting us the use of the perfectly-sized space of their ¨Multi-use Room¨and providing us with two helpers to install the work.

 

Thank you to the university volunteers Karla Aguayo Cornejo, Joselyn Parrales Salas and Alejandra Ordoñez Torres for their invaluable help in mounting the work and preparing the posters in the preparation weeks:  

   

Thank you to Amiaz Narváez and Andre Lam who have been visiting JUCONI and were happy to get hands-on in the office, and to my brilliantly supportive Club de Arte colleague Ronald Proaño, plus these three teenage volunteers from Nueva Prosperina:  

Huge thanks to my two old friends Lucy Pickles and Kory OJ who appeared from their travels with incredible timing and helped me install all the work in the gallery over the course of two very intensive days last week:  

Thank you to my colleague and Club de Arte photographer and assistant Blanca Moreno for all of her great work over the last 18 months. Blanca´s time with CMAP came to a close at the end of July and we had a lovely goodbye for her in the office, and handed out these Superhero-themed goodbye cards to the kids for her in the exhibition space. Thank you to JUCONI volunteer Raul Abraham Macias for designing the cards. Good luck Blanca as you move forward with your photography!:

A very personal huge  thank you too, to all of the children and teenagers who have participated in Club de Arte since I arrived in January this year. The kids are what make this placement so hugely enjoyable and varied, they bring such a lot of energy, enthusiasm and imagination into our workshops and it is a real privilege to be here in Ecuador working with them. When the Sergio Toral kids gave me this card at the exhibition opening it literally brought tears to my eyes:  

Thank you to all of my colleagues at JUCONI and especially to Emilio Carrillo, Jean Carlos Alava and Ronald Proaño for co-ordinating and executing the logistics of transport and snacks throughout the exhibtion. Thank you also to MIES, The Ministry of Social and Educational Inclusion here in Ecuador, for their ongoing support of JUCONI´s work and their involvement in making this exhibition possible:  

And the very final thank you to Olivia and Lynn and all of the CMAP team for their ongoing behind-the-scenes support of our volunteer placements, and for making this amazingly fulfilling artistic collaboration between CMAP and JUCONI possbile! :-)