Arts Lab 5.0: Rafael Raețchi, R. of Moldova - Month 1

After one month of involvement in the Arts Lab 5.0 project, I have managed to help implement a range of the project’s planned activities. The production of 5 interviews with local artists, the implementation of 3 workshops and a small contribution in the Folcloristica Festival. Also partook in the recording of over 10 interviews, all of which, ideally, will be edited in the following month. During this month I have managed to connect with the participants of the project on a peer-to-peer level. In the following report, I will go in a clearer detail on the mentioned above aspects and more. 

Despite time and budget restraints, our team and I managed to implement the planned activities efficiently during the last month. During this month I have implemented 3 workshops. I would describe two of them successful, while the third one offered me better insight into how I want to organise my workshops.

The first workshop, at Folcloristica Festival, was on the fundamentals of animation. The workshop went smoothly, and some of the students ended up being interested in continuing to animate at home.

The second workshop, at Piatra Neamț, also went smoothly. I tried a different workshop, this time on Emotion Guided Illustration. The students were much more engaged in the process, with an overwhelming majority of them getting completely involved in the workshop.

The third workshop, at Petru Rareș Technical School did not go as smoothly. It required much more effort from me to get the students involved, and we also tested a new workshop format, which was not as successful. At the same time, the experience allowed me to understand how better organise my workshops, and to understand the problems of the tested workshop. For the second part of the workshop, I will change certain aspects of the workshop to involve the students more in the activities.

During this month we took more than 10 interviews from local artists, out of which 5 are edited. With the help of the team, we managed to keep the standards high. With the use of AI technology we delivered the best audio quality possible. We created an intro/outro sequence for the interviews, and edited them at the highest standards possible. Initially we implemented more complex graphics and 2D animation, but due to the lack of time we decided to stop. The lack of time also creates a backlog of interviews to be edited, but I believe that in the next month we’ll be able to edit them.  

Regarding the Alternative Museums, this month I’ve had both a succes and a failure. I believe that I have failed to provide/create quality artwork for the Alternative Folklore Museum. I have focused on creating the artwork with the students from Petru Rareș school, which in retrospective was a mistake. I decided to focus on working with other Romanian artists for the museum artworks in order to create the needed artworks, at the quality standards I intend on delivering. And here comes the succes of this month.

I have managed to establish 3 contacts with potential collaborators for the Alternative Museums. One of them, Alex, has already confirmed their participation in the Alternative Cucuteni Museum. In the following days I will be contacting the other two.

Rafael Raețchi is from Republic of Moldova, and is participating in a six-month volunteering program within Arts Lab 5.0, a project co-funded by the European Union through the European Solidarity Corps.