Arts Lab 7.0: Oliwia Mieczkowska | Month VI

MidTerm

The month started off with the MidTerm Evaluation Meeting in Bucharest. We did a lot of activities, workshops and games. To be honest, the best part was meeting new people. But unfortunately, I got sick from the food of the hotel, so I didn’t get to make deep connections and friendships, but the night outs were still very nice to have.

The experience in general was pretty chill. It wasn’t something super amazing, but also not as boring as it could have been. The people were fun and it was nice to have all the people from the house there at the same time.

I found out a lot about other projects, we compared and gave suggestions. I also got to know a lot of people. We shared stories and memories, hopes and problems. We all found out that we are all so similar to each other & that no one is alone.

For the future I would not eat at the hotel anymore to not get food poisoning lol. I would also try to make more connections and contacts for the future. I would have loved to use this experience to learn more, but it was out of my control. In the future I would like to use the knowledge I gained from this experience and apply it to my daily life as a volunteer.

Budapest

After the midterm, we had some free days and most of the Act House Group decided to travel together to Budapest! We stayed there for 4 days and did a lot of touristic stuff, partied and enjoyed not working.

It was an amazing vacation. I enjoyed every single second of it!

I realized how much I appreciate this experience and the people I live with. We are an amazing group and I love it so much.

In the future i would love to do at least one more vacation! I need to use the time we have left very wisely.

Personal artwork - Cucuteni

For my personal artwork, I did ceramics and died fabric. It is a artwork about motherhood and fertility.

The process was annoying as first I couldn’t find the fabric I needed, and then after I thought I found the perfect one, it wasn’t of good quality and the bleach didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. In the night before the exhibition I wanted to give up and just exhibit the clay pieces, but Eva helped me with a new idea to die the fabric and not bleach it. This also didn’t work out as well as I imagined but in the end no one is as criticizing as I am myself so it turned out pretty cute.

In the future, I would look for materials before starting on the artwork, to not stress so much if I can’t find something or something doesn’t work out.

Exhibition

We did multiple exhibitions this time. One with all the kids from our residencies from Târgu and then one with students from another village.

It was so much fun as the kids are very excited to participate and do the activities that we have planned. We had so many students attend and it was very productive but also pretty exhausting as we had to do the activities for multiple hours.

I saw the impact we have on the community here. The kids remembered be even though I did my residency with them in October. It was such cute moment and I am very grateful for this. I also learned that its good for the activity to be easily adaptable for the abilities and age of the participants. It makes the experience better for them.

In the future I hope we wont have 5 hour long exhibitions. For the interactive part I wouldn’t change a thing, it was pretty good.

Ramadan

Almost half of the people in the house are Muslim and almost all of them are fasting for Ramadan. It was the first time that so many people around me fasted and I really wanted to try out, how it is. Throughout the whole month I fasted 1,5 weeks. Which is nothing compared to what they do. But I also didn’t want to make myself suffer and not enjoy the experience dur to hunger and low energy.

But the days that I fasted it felt pretty good. I realised how much of my time everyday gets wasted to thinking, cooking and eating food. My days became so long.

In the future I would maybe do this again if I was surrounded by so many people who are also fasting. But I don’t think that this will happen, so it was a good thing to experience. On my own i probably wont have the energy and motivation to do it lol. I’m weak after all.

Personal Project/Emotion Museum

As the project is slowly coming to an end, we started our last big project: The emotions project. We were free to design a personal project around the emotion that we picked. For me, it is the emotion of embarrassment. But as the last weeks and the last two topics felt so rushed and the whole project in general wasn’t so free yet, I was very overwhelmed with the idea of planning and hosting some project myself. It felt like too much for my low level of energy. And over half of the people around me felt the same. Mihaela realized this and suggested more practical tasks like designing the hub, and I settled on trying to engage more local volunteers.

It feels a bit lazy and like the easy way out of the situation, but I don’t want to stress myself out too much and just enjoy the last weeks in the project.

I just learned that its important to listen to my gut feeling and in the future I would have loved to just have more time for a project like this. Maybe have it in the middle of the whole experience and not rushed in the very end.

Next to the personal project, we have to do an personal artwork on the same emotion. As I got embarrassment, which is a pretty niece one, I fist had NO idea what to do. I wanted to do street photography at first and capture a lot of different emotions. But as its pretty hard to capture embarrassment, as its just a millisecond, i gave up on this. Mihaela then inspired me to maybe do portraits, and for now this is what ill probably settle with.

I feel like I could do better than this, but I’m so burned out and stressed by what to do after this project that I don’t have any energy to put in.

Hopefully I will do some more brainstorming and maybe change a bit, we will see. Stay tuned!

This monthly report was written by Oliwia Mieczkowska, our Polish/German volunteer taking part in a seven-month Arts Lab 7.0 mobility, co-funded by the European Union under the European Solidarity Corps.