Arts Lab 7.0: Eva Below | Month III

Dear Journal, between JEMOM residencies, workshops, rehearsals and public events, the month from 15 November to 15 December has felt like one long and intense breath.

In the third week of November I spent most mornings shaping ideas for my work around memory and genocide. We worked collaboratively on a performance named “Shadows: Cycle, Human, Crowd”. I contributed to the writing, directing, stage management, and scenographic conception, with a particular focus on costume design. My costumes draw from the visual language of German Expressionism, not only in their stark abstraction but also in their emotional intensity and symbolic distortion of form. I was drawn to Expressionism’s fractured aesthetic because it makes visible the inward convulsion of the human soul. It gave me a way to translate spiritual and moral breakdown into something the audience could encounter visually. The patterns I created were deliberately primitive, built from simple shapes like squares and rectangles. This choice connects to ancestral craft traditions and to the shared origins of human making. Before divisions and hierarchies existed, humanity was bound by simplicity, by the same fabric of being. These basic shapes carry that memory. For me, geometry becomes a symbol of unity, a quiet resistance against fragmentation. Genocide is not a distant story. It is a recurring fracture in our moral fabric, one we must continuously confront through art and remembrance. 

One morning we went to a local school to promote the JEMOM residencies, sharing with young people what the project is about and how art can become a form of remembrance. It gave me a clearer view of how our small daily tasks are part of a wider artistic and educational ecosystem. Another important moment that week was an online workshop with art students: first an interactive presentation about our cultures, then a presentation of alternative museums and of the JEMOM residencies. Evenings filled up with a workshop led by Monica and Aya about crochet and an impro workshop with Salma.

The last week of November began with a day dedicated to rehearsals. Mid‑week was dedicated to the JEMOM residencies. Together with Hedvika, I worked with youngsters from Garabet Ibrăileanu school in a six‑day workshop, with around ten participants each day. Our main goal was to raise awareness about the Holocaust tragedy of 1941, which also took place here in Târgu Frumos. It felt very touching to sense that we might have been the first people to open this heavy history with them, helping to shape their first understanding of what happened in their own city. Another central aim was to help them connect with their emotions. We chose to work specifically with anger, understanding it as a feeling that appears when a boundary is crossed and that can guide us toward repairing the boundary, finding safety again, and eventually reaching forgiveness. Each day started with warm‑ups to prepare them, then movement games, then a table activity like drawing, clay work, writing or dough modelling. At the end of each workshop they drew a symbol of the day and chose an emotion card to express how they felt after working with us. Our approach stayed mostly non‑formal, using many different techniques (energizers, cooperative artwork, group work, quizzes, board questioning, documentary viewing, discussions, relaxation games, and movement‑based games) so as not to lose them with too much information, too much drawing or too much talking. One day we also made a group trip to the Jewish cemetery. Through all this, the youngsters learned about the history of the Jewish people in their city and began to recognize key symbols like the Star of David and the swastika. The emotional impact was even stronger when we showed the documentary “Black Sunday” and visited the cemetery, where they could see, feel, observe and share. This one‑week experience definitely left something in all of us. The final group clay artwork, focused on the feeling of forgiveness, carries the idea that forgiveness can only be reached when history is clearly described, understood and accepted. Every afternoon we had debriefing meetings, trying to digest what had happened so far, what was working in the methodology and what needed care or adjustment. On Saturday we held an event at the HUB presenting the Open HeART HUB methodology, mixing it with a round‑table café and a Romanian language lesson; this blend of pedagogical reflection, informal conversation and language learning felt very Arts Lab: messy, human, and deeply intercultural. By Sunday I was grateful for a free day, even if my brain still replayed fragments of conversations, images for the performance, and questions about how to hold space for difficult histories.​

With the beginning of December the focus shifted more clearly toward the JEMOM performance and exhibition. Early in the month we evaluated the residency experience, worked on the catalogue, and began concrete preparations for the exhibition: planning, listing materials, thinking about spatial narratives and the emotional journey of visitors. There was an online presentation of the residency results for art students, where we had to translate weeks of experiments, rehearsals and conversations into a coherent narrative that others could understand. The weekend kept a balance between scheduled mentorship and strategy sessions at the HUB and intense work on the costumes for the performance. On the performance side, rehearsals, mentoring and fine‑tuning of the JEMOM performance continued in the background of these public events, sometimes late into the evening, as we adjusted transitions, tested costumes and scenography, and tried to keep the emotional core of the piece alive rather than drowning it in technical stress.

The second week of December intensified this pre‑exhibition energy. Mornings were dedicated to the preparation of the exhibition at the HUB. The exhibition took place on Tuesday the 9th of December. For it, we created a collective performance called “Shadows: Cycle, Human, Crowd”, a performative triptych exploring how humanity turns against itself through repetition, mirroring, and obedience. Structured in three frames, it traces the transformation of everyday gestures into collective violence. Domestic harmony fractures into exclusion, the solitary voice recites amid violence, and the crowd becomes a militia governed by projected commands. Each sequence reveals that the destruction inflicted upon one is generated from within the same shared body. Presented within the Jewish Memorial Museum of Târgu Frumos (JEMOM), the work embodies remembrance through action rather than reenactment. It links the memory of genocides with the universal fragility of moral consciousness, translating historical trauma into a meditation on complicity and empathy. The prevailing emotion is one of disturbing recognition. Genocide begins not in distance but in proximity, when reflection gives way to silence. At the end of the week, we visited the Rroma/MARr Gallery, discussing how to design it and planning its role in the school it is located in. Afternoons included planning for the next week of intercultural days. After weeks working on the performance, everything seemed to expand outward from our rehearsal room into streets, markets and schools. Alongside the logistical work, we had sessions focused on emotions. The 15th of December was coloured by the preparation of the intercultural festival in the Ion Creangă school. I was assigned a class to prepare a presentation, food, a performance and a stand about France. Considering the theme of the festival is Christmas festivities, I decided to base my activity off of my city, Strasbourg, the capital of Christmas. These Christmas preparations gave a soft, domestic frame to all this activity. Planning presents, food, decorations after thinking about genocide, memory and social justice can feel contradictory but maybe this tension is exactly where life happens.​

Emotionally this month has been a rollercoaster. On some days I felt overflowing with stimulation: the schedule was so full that new experiences piled up faster than I could process them, leaving me slightly dizzy and wondering where the line lies between commitment and self‑erasure. At the same time, I often felt privileged to be surrounded by so many inspiring beings. My fellow volunteers hold a kind of quiet strength that makes it possible to deal with heavy themes without collapsing. I felt a sense of belonging, as if a temporary family were forming around shared questions. There were also moments of frustration and fatigue: rehearsals where nothing seemed to work, days where the to‑do list was longer than my energy and the constant feeling that time was slipping away faster than my capacity to integrate what I was living.​​

What I am learning through this rhythm is that structure is a form of care. The repeated pattern of activity–debrief–documentation kept me from simply “surviving” the calendar and helped transform experiences into shared knowledge. I am also discovering how central dialogue is to this kind of memorial art. Promoting residencies in schools and guiding workshops feed directly back into the performance and exhibition, shaping not only what we show but how we show it. Personally, I notice that my own artistic process grows when I protect time for quiet research and making, even in a busy collective project. The weeks where I managed to balance personal artwork with group obligations felt richer and more grounded.​​

Looking ahead, my intention for the coming months is to keep deepening my own artistic research, while setting clearer boundaries around rest and integration. Concretely this means continuing to refine my artistic expression, using feedback from caravans, festivals and school visits to adjust how we talk about sensitive topics and shared humanity. I also want to develop new concepts that might travel to other festivals or contexts during Arts Lab 7.0. It also means planning regular moments of slowness to avoid numbing out in front of so much content and instead stay present to what this experience is changing in me. Little by little, I feel that I am making this experience truly mine. I want to continue building on this momentum with more intention, more honesty and a bit more gentleness towards my limits.​​

This monthly report was written by Eva Below, our French volunteer taking part in a seven-month Arts Lab 7.0 mobility, co-funded by the European Union under the European Solidarity Corps.