Arts Lab 6.0: Luca Horváth - Month 5

Big Bună Ziua everyone!!

This month was the month of adventures – Bucharest, Brașov, Cucuteni, Bacău – and coincidentally (or not?) I feel like this month was the one that challenged me the most on a personal level so far.

We started the MARr residencies - together with Sinem, we facilitated papercraft workshops for kids at Școala Gimnazială "Ion Creangă". Honestly, it was so far my favorite residency experience, for us, everything went smoothly and our kids were amazing.

The sad news of Kristers and Katrina leaving us really shocked me, for the lack of a better word. It made me emotional. Nonetheless, travelling to Bucharest was exciting. If I think about it, this was probably the first trip that we did all together without a “trusted adult”. The mid-term was good, we had nice trainers and we had the chance to explore Bucharest too. We made sure to have a lot of fun together on a big playground at night and say goodbye to the Latvians together with an awesome experience. 

And of course, I have to mention the water at the hotel we stayed in for the mid-term. We were all addicted to this beautiful drink that came out of the magic water machine. My personal favorite thing, however, was the hot chocolate on demand machine. It actually tasted so good. We ate and drank well those few days. After the mid-term was over, Sinem, Sona, Nikola, Soukaina and I took a train to Brașov and although very chaotic, we finally arrived at our accommodation. I hiked to the top of Mountain Tâmpa, we visited Dracula’s castle and explored the city. All in all, it was a good little vacation.

We jumped right back into work after returning and we finally got a new fridge too. We continued with the MARr residencies and the time for the first exhibition drew closer. As everyone started to finish up their personal artwork, I started working on my usual stickers. I’m very proud of them this time, actually. I helped Sona out with the catalogue more too. The exhibition was nice, it was a lot more organized thanks to Salma’s artwork and I felt a lot less stressed. I realized the flaws of my artwork and took it as a learning experience.

Got dropped into Cucuteni a few days later, with the proposal of changing up the usual residency method we had so far. We were tasked to bring local volunteers who would be interested in working together with the organization long-term. Savane and I set up a workshop where we invited anyone interested in drawing and designing to create stickers inspired by the Cucuteni culture. This change of method was really challenging for us, since neither Savane or I are the kind of people who like taking initiative. I haven’t found a way to force myself to do things that are just not natural for me. Despite this, I think we will have some concrete results by the end of this week and any opportunity I get to practice Adobe Illustrator is good for me.

These past weeks I took on a lot of solo adventures. Going together with others seemed like a good idea, but I had to realize I like to do what I want and when I want. That might sound a bit too selfish, but really, the freedom to go at my own pace to places I actually want to go to is, turns out, very important to me when traveling. Hiking alone to the top of Mountain Tâmpa was definitely not the safest thing to do, but it was what I needed. Going to a concert alone in a mostly unknown city late at night was also probably not the safest thing to do, but I know it was the only way for me. I needed to prove a point to myself, and I succeeded.

I’m excited to have the free time to travel to random places and create art, possibly even the Cucuteni catalogue.

Report written by Luca Horváth, she's from Hungary and she's one of the 14 volunteers participating in Arts Lab 6.0, a project co-funded by the European Union through the European Solidarity Corps program.