Arts Lab 6.0: Nikola Svobodova - Month 5

This month has been really long and full of many different things. If we thought any other month was busy, we didn’t know what was coming.

We started by continuing our school residency in Școala Gimnazială "Ion Creangă", me and Soukaina got to paint a wall in the school gym. The participants were really talented and it went by really fast.

We had to stop the residency because of the midterm, things took a rapid speed after that. Firstly we had a Latvian night and said our goodbyes to Katrina and Kristers. Right after the Latvian night, the same night we travelled with a night train to Bucharest, for the midterm. The whole midterm was surprisingly a very pleasant experience. Since the day we arrived, we had a good time. The training was really reflective for us, it gave us space for us to meet other people from other projects and compare our experiences. It really helped us to step out of our project and see it from a different view, to see the positives and negatives. Other than the training, it was really refreshing to discover new place in Romania. We found some nice spots in Bucharest, one of them that I really liked was a big park few minutes from the hotel. It was a beautiful park, with majestic trees and a lot of nature as well as a big ice-skating rink, it was really fun to teach Soukaina how to ice-skate… she tried. Also thing worth of mentioning, was a water machine we had in the hotel. I know our whole group can agree and connect on how magical and pure this water was XD. We need that machine.

But our traveling experience didn’t end in Bucharest, me and a few other girls took a trip to Brașov. We had just a few days there, but the trip was really fun. We took a trip to Bran castle, and overall saw lots of historical parts of Brașov. We had a lot of fun outside in the city as well as in our small apartment. I think this trip was really needed and made us even more close. We had to get back after a few days though because we were having an exhibition in the local library.

After that we of course continued our school residency with painting the wall, we had a few days to finish the painting and make another one next to it. It was supposed to be on the theme of a better future for all the kids in the workshop, so we painted a big star with the most active participants. We really enjoyed painting with the students and are glad that we will meet them again in the exhibition we prepared their artworks for.

After the residency we had a few days to prepare for the Rroma exhibition. I prepared two connected posters and an interactive part with herbs and the properties the Romani people used them for. This exhibition was a bit different, we had a lot of kids and youth. After that we closed this chapter and started to learn about Cucuteni. We travelled to Cucuteni and the museum that is there, unfortunately it was closed. Now we’re finding local volunteers to create residency withs them. Me and Rahaf are making entrepreneurship space for these volunteers, to express themselves in their creative fields.

At the end of this month I also hosted the Czech Night!!  To be honest I was a bit nervous to host a night presenting my country by myself. I thought I wouldn’t be able to cook all the food I want, and was overall just stressed. But in the end it was really nice to present my country, to show the food we have, how beautiful our nature is, the historical parts of our cities, the traditions and just our nation. It also helped me to see how proud I am of our culture and the country I come from.

The best things come unplanned, another fun thing we did was play billiard. Me and Sona went to Iasi to play in a local game place billiard with some people. I never played this game but it was really fun to try to learn it. Another big thing was Soukaina’s birthday!! We cooked a cake with her and celebrated her 21st birthday.

Report written by Nikola Svobodova, she's from Czech Republic 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.