A series of art projects and workshops from South America, inspired by a love for community and collaboration and a firm belief in the power of art as both a transformative tool and a way to facilitate inclusion and equality in society and education.
Back in the first weekend of November Tyrone took me to his family's finca in the coutryside near Palenque. A beautiful long weekend of learning how to pick star fruit (in Spanish 'Tumbar carambolas'), watching yucca picking, getting fruta-pan out of their strangley animal-esque squishy husks, and bathing in the river…beautiful! Thank you Ty xx
P.s. The week after, in an uncostomary venture in the kitchen, discovered that these star fruit make a great crumble combined with raspberries!
A trip to Puerto Lopez for Becky's last weeked with us before she headed to JUCONI Mexico back in late October last year, with Rodrigo and Antonella, Maria José and Laura, where we spotted blue footed boobies in the fish market on the beach and went swimming in the sea and crab watching in the cave at los Frailes.
And visiting top visitor spots of Parque Historico and the Iguana Park with new volunteer Emily arriving the very same week that Becky left:
IDEA AND AIMS: For the children and facilitators to celebrate the end of the project and Christmas as a group through face painting, filming interviews with the children and their rag dolls, sharing special snack food and receiving cards and sweets. Also, for the children to have the opportunity to express their opinions, hopes and festive messages through their rag dolls on video, and in so doing, to generate enough footage from the four groups to edit into a festive film to use on the cmap and JUCONI media platforms.
PROCESS:
1. Facilitators pre-prepare: cards for each child with a photo of them on the front. Bag up sweets and biscuits into festive goody bags for each child.
2. Facilitators face paint all of the children one-by-one, with the older chidren helping if they want to (and in the case of Sergio Toral, with the younger kids taking turns to paint the facilitators too!)
3. The children are filmed individually or in groups with their rag dolls. The rag dolls are interviewed, being asked what was best for them about 2014 and what they wish for 2015.
4. Whilst waiting to be filmed, the children draw Christmas cards (in Sergio Toral and Nueva Prosperina) or play sports (in Socio Vivienda).
5. At the end of the session the whole group receives special snack food and festive cards and sweet bags are handed out to the children.
MATERIALS FOR ‘END OF YEAR CELEBRATIONS’
2 x cameras, 1 x tripod.
face paint, paintbrushes, wetwipes and glitter
all of the children’s previously made rag dolls
individual cards for the children with a photo each on the front
a festive sweet bag for each child
WATCH THE VIDEO “OUR IMAGINARY FRIENDS” ON YOUTUBE:
A Merry Christmas from the Sergio Toral children and their imaginary friends:
And a Happy New Year from the Nueva Prosperina children and their imaginary friends:
The Socio Vivienda 2 morning and afternoon groups wish you a fun festive season:
NOTE: The tradition in Guayaquil and Ecuador as a whole is for families and communities to burn their 'monigotes' (rag dolls) on New Year's Eve, to symbolise letting go of the previous year and inviting in the new year. As facilitators we were consious of needing to be aware of safety issues, and so in this final session we explained to the children that they could only burn their rag dolls with the supervision of a responsible adult, and as we handed out the rag dolls to be taken home we pinned a note with the same advise to each doll.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ALL OF OUR ART CLUB KIDS AND FACILITATORS HERE IN GUAYAQUIL!
IDEA AND AIMS: For the children to complete the final part of the 3-stage process by personalising their rag doll's head with a face, with eyes, mouth and hair.
PROCESS:
1. Hair: Tear up strips of magazines, choosing the colour of the pages to represent the desired hair colour for their rag doll. Glue the strips to the head base.
2. Face: Mix the skin colour and eye colour of choiec and paint in the eyes, mouth and skin.
NOTE: With the first group, in Sergio Toral, coloured tissue paper was used instead of paint for the skin colours and print outs of eyes and mouths were used. The tissue paper was vey messy and fiddly and the print out eyes too bold and brash, so for Socio Vivienda and Nueva Prosperina paint was used instead. Some children in these groups cut out mouths and eyes from magazines.
MATERIALS FOR ‘RAG DOLL HEADS’
Instruction posters and examples.
paint, paintbrushes, cloths and bowls
magazines
scissors, silicone and glue
water, cloths and soap to clean up
camera
Meet three of the children's finished rag dolls:
NOTE: In both groups in Socio Vivienda 2 there have been issues with numbers of children attending the sessions, in part because of the new location. Working in the church, and for messy sessions in the open air football pitch, has meant that it has not been possible to restrict the numbers of children to one specific register and many passing children have joined in for one-off sessions. As previously mentioned, when work has been drying in the football pitch the children themselves have often damaged or destroyed it. The consequence of all of this became very apprent in this session, where the idea was that each child worked on the base of the head that they had previously made. In reality many children who appeared for this session had not made heads, or their heads had been destroyed. Facilitators both repaired heads in the office before the session and improvised during the session, asking children without balloon bases to paint on cardboard cut-out heads.
IDEA AND AIMS: For the children to complete part 2 of the 3-stage process of making their rag doll, by making the body using cardboard and cloth construction.
PROCESS:
1. Each child shapes a body by rolling a sheet of thick cardboard into a cylinder.
2. Next the child rolls up sheets of paper into long tubes that can be secured onto the body with masking tape and silicone.
3. Dress the whole body by wrapping it in cloth scraps.
MATERIALS FOR ‘RAG DOLL BODIES’
Instruction posters and examples.
Cardboard
large sheets of white paper
masking tape
scissors
silicone
material scraps and old clothes
bags for rubbish, cloths and soap for the clean up
camera
NOTE: On November 13th 2014 had a serious bike accident in which I fractured my coccyx, so from this date on my movement was significantly restircted and unfortunately I had to miss three workshops: the head making and body making in Nueva Prosperina and body making in Sergio Toral. Our new cmap volunteer Emily was dropped in the deep end when, after only a couple of weeks at JUCONI she had to lead these 3 sessions alone, with the support of on various days, Ronald, Joseph and Carolina. Well done Emily for doing an amazing job and for being so supportive to me too!
IDEA AND AIMS: For the children to complete the first part 1 of the 3-stage process of making their rag doll, using papiér-machê construction techniques.
PROCESS:
1. Facilitators: pre-mix the glue paste: 1 part plain flour to 2 parts warm water + spoonful of salt (salt to prevent mould growing in humidity). Take in 2 x 5 bottles per session of 20-25 children.
2. Children: each inflate a balloon. Tear up strips of newspaper. Cover the balloon in at least 4 layers of newspaper and glue. Add egg carton cups for nose and eyes as desired, fixing them down with more strips of newspaper. Tear up strips of thin white paper. Cover the whole head with 1 or 2 layers of white paper. Leave the head in the sun to dry.
Balloon inflating in Sergio Toral
Papier-machê in the playground of Nueva Prosperina...
…and in the football pitch of Socio Vivienda 2.
MATERIALS FOR ‘RAG DOLL HEADS’
Instruction posters and examples.
Balloons
newspaper (not yellowed newspaper as it won’t stick)
thin white paper
small plastic pots to use as bases
egg cartons
scissors
papíer-machê paste
bowls
water, cloths and soap to clean up
camera
Definitely our messiest of the session of the year, this activity was really fun for the kids and took us out of the space of the church in Socio Vivienda 2 into the new setting of the open-air football pitch.
Note: The downside to working in the public setting was not being able to restrict the number of participants, so materials ran scarce and as there are a number of children in the group with destructive tendencies unfortunately a lot of the work was damaged as children began to kick around the drying heads as though they were footballs.
IDEA AND AIMS: To introduce this term's big project, "Our Años Viejos [Old Years']" and for the children to collaborate in small groups to come up with their own character designs. 'Años Viejos', also known as 'monigotes', (which translates as 'rag dolls') are giant figures that are traditionally burnt in Guayaquil on the 31st December as part of the New Year's celebrations. They tend to be based on cartoon characters, superheroes or famous personalities and can be made either entirely from papier-mâché or with a paper head and straw or sawdust-filled body (perhaps something similar to our Guyfawkes figures burned on the 5th November in the UK). To encourage our children to come up with original ideas for their own monigote characterswe decided to theme this character design session on imaginary friends. PROCESS: 1. Our first step was to introduce the idea of imaginary friends by reading from Jonah Winter's illustrated children's book "Frida", which recounts the story of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The book talks about Frida having "an imaginary friend called Frida" and refers to her drawings and paintings as sources of companionship and strength for her. It was amazing to observe just how captivated the children were in listening to the story being read aloud. These moments were the most peacful we have seen in Art Club in the entire year!
2. To generate their character designs the children worked in groups of 2 or 3 to play the drawing game "exquisite corpse" (a slightly morbid name for what is a really fun collaborative activity!) Taking a large piece of paper each, each child draws the head of any animal/ human/ plant of their choosing (it can be as abstract as they like), fold the paper over to hide the head, but making sure that two lines stick out, and pass the paper to the neighbour on their right. Taking the paper from their friend, the child then draws a body, folds the paper and passes it to the right. On the final piece of paper the child draws feet/ hooves/ base. Finally the papers are all opened up and the character design revealed.
3. Using scraps of coloured papers and tissue paper the children then decorate their character designs and finally give them a name.
MATERIALS:
Children’s book Frida
CDs and CD player
instruction posters and examples, including image reference of imaginary friends from films and children’s books
…and a very quirky detail from this imaginary friend:
“My friend Etrasfillos is imagining eating a person, to see what flavour humans have.”
Jean Carlos, Nueva Prosperina 06.11.14
The result of this collaborative activity, as you can see above, were some very imaginative character hybrids, or 'fusions' as one of our children described them, a great starting point for the monigotes or rag dolls to come.
