Arts Lab 6.0: Nikola Svobodova - Month 2

I can’t believe another month has passed, it’s going really fast. We started this month by working on our personal project for the JEMOM museum and continued it by traveling with an exhibition for it.

Each one of us chose and created their artwork for this museum. I created a painting. We presented our artworks for the first time in the ACT house on our first exhibition, it was a new experience for us. Planning an exhibition, putting our artworks next to each other in the space and seeing how they work and compliment each other.

We traveled with this exhibition even to Iași, we had an opportunity to have an exhibition in the Pogrom Museum of the Holocaust in Romania. Firstly before the exhibition we had a conference with a competition. Gallerist, historians and other people talked about this museum and project. People presented their models for reconstruction of Jewish cemetery in Târgu Frumos, these models were compared for the competition. After this conference ended the exhibition began. It was really great to share this exhibition also with people from Iași, more people got to know about this horrible story and also discovered this museum.

Another place we went to with this exhibition was Bacău. The place where we shared the exhibition was a high school. We created workshops, connected to this museum and sometimes even to our artworks, for the kids. We talked with them and educated them about this history.

Other than that we had French and Syrian nights, celebrated Halloween in Iași, saw the first snow here and started a new museum - the Alternative Folklore Museum. Right now we are doing a residency in a Technological High School, I am working on a paper mask making with Ella. We are still having trouble with the language barrier, just a few kids speak English. But most of them don’t or are scared to speak other language than Romanian.

I am really excited to see what the other month brings!

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.