Arts Lab 5.0: Dajana Zharassov, Germany - Month 2

Hello again! Welcome to my second-month report.

This month, we finally had our first alternative museum of Romanian folklore, and it was very exciting to host the first exhibition. I think that I also learned to coordinate my projects and time better since I had lots of ideas and maybe planned to do too much, which made me feel really stressed before the exhibition. It was really nice to see lots of familiar faces at our art exhibition, and I felt very happy to see people enjoy my personal interactive artwork, which was the Romanian folklore card game. It was so great to see them play and have fun and to already see people memorizing and learning more about Romanian embroidery while playing. My second personal artwork was also my photography about Romanian folklore, which I had taken in my first month. The visitors of the art exhibition had to go around and collect a word from each volunteer which had something to do with Romanian folklore. I had the word "community" since games like this bring family and friends together, and my photos also portrayed the community of people trying to uplift the Romanian traditions and also the Romanian village community life.

We also had children from Iași visiting us, and we did some workshops with them. I did the clay workshop with Violeta again, and the children held some thank you speeches at the end, which made me feel emotional. Hearing those cute children thank us with their whole heart made me tear up and made me realize that the work that I do here does have an impact.

After this, we started our art residency at the Garabet Ibrăileanu School where I collaborated with Carla. Our workshop consisted of making nature art and cinema.

On the first day, we tried to break the ice with the kids by playing games and also teaching them about the Cucuteni in a fun way by role-playing how the Cucuteni lived and acted.

And in the following days, our group grew, which made it a bit more challenging to manage the children, and we also started doing the nature art. We explained to the children that we want to do art using natural materials like wood, stone, and wool and to use them as background goods and to set a scene for a Cucuteni short film that we want to do at the end of the art residency.

We let the children collect some natural materials, and they already could plan how they want to lay some materials out in the scene. In the next days, we painted stones and wood with Cucuteni symbols and crafted some other goods like wood stars and hanging decorations which depict the 8 phases of the moon.

My and Carla's idea was to make a short film and craft some goods that connect to the Cucuteni goddess and the Cucuteni cherishing fertility which connects to the 8 lunar phases and a woman's cycle. Carla and I would also collect some stones and wood sticks and paint them and craft things too in our free time to meet the deadline, which was sometimes a bit stressful but I really enjoyed my time with Carla and how much fun we had. I am thankful for having found such a friend here in Romania. We also made a quick sketch of the layout of how we would put the scene for the filming, how we use the symbols, and we made a storyboard.

On the last day, the children came in their best outfits which was really sweet to see, and we arranged the filming space and put up our crafted Cucuteni things. While we put up the things and cleaned the space a little, I gave my camera to some children so that they could try out photography. It was cute and great to see how invested they were in trying out the camera.

We filmed the short film, and it was a bit rushed because even though we came early to build the scene, there wasn't much time left till the sun set and children had to go home. But we did manage to film some of the scenes how we planned which turned out pretty good. The children also had fun acting in the short film, and I also did some photography when I had time to.

Now Carla and I plan to continue the filming project because we really enjoyed the process and our ideas. Right now we are preparing for the Cucuteni alternative museum.

Oh, and Arty, our little dog volunteer, is now in Germany at my parents' house since it was getting too cold here for him. In one of the pictures, you can see him and his passport.

Like this, another month ends, and I am curious about what the next month holds for me and which amazing people I am about to meet.

See you next month! 

Dajana Zharassov is from Germany, and she 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.