Arts Lab 6.0: Nikola Svobodova - Month 6

Every time I am writing a report, at the end of the month, I am surprised how fast it went by. Like this is the penultimate one, which is hard for me to believe.

We started by having a three day caravan in Iași in The French Institute. We went one after another on the exhibition topic, starting with Jemon, after that followed with Folcloristica and finished with Rroma. For each of these caravans we prepared an activity connected to our artwork. We had different participants, from different schools, each day. The French Institute gave us space to create our workshops and connect to the youth in Iasi.

During this month Iași was decorated with many statues, it was the month of statues in Romania. We discovered Iași is known as being the cultural centre of Romania, so they had an exhibition with more statues in The Turkish Bath. This exhibition was very nice and overall the city looked brighter and more beautiful with different artworks scattered around it.

After The French Institute we started to work on our Cucuteni artwork. During the caravan we also visited the Cucuteni museum in Iași to get more inspiration for creating our artwork. I decided to create an abstract painting with ceramic pieces around it. The vision of this artwork was inspired by the Cucuteni matriarchal culture and the statues of women that they created. During creating these ceramic pieces I also had these things in mind, but because they are also abstract everyone can see whatever they want in it. This was my first time doing ceramics for an artwork, I did some modeling before, but never went as far as firing or even glazing. I really enjoyed the process, trying new mediums and techniques is really fun.

After finishing the artwork days we had the Cucuteni exhibition, this was our last exhibition with a museum theme. It was a bit different, because everyone had an interactive part and visitors and even us tried a lot of different things. My interactive part was letting people design their own Cucuteni statue. Me and Rahaf also presented the work we did with the volunteers. We created a card game called CUCUT inspired by Dixit. Different volunteers designed all the cards and then we created the back side and the box of the cards.

During this month we finished the cycle of the cultural nights. The last one was the Moroccan night presented by Soukaina. It was very fun and educational to learn about other cultures, the facts, the habits, food and more. We also did a fun group activity, we took the people who wanted to come to the billiard place in Iasi. It was very fun to play there, we didn’t even wanted to leave. And for sure we will come back. The weather is starting to get warmer now, so we also started to discover more the nature around us, it is very important to get grounded and connect to it.

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.