Arts Lab 6.0: Sinem Sağdıç - Month 1

Even though I arrived at the ACT House a week later than most of the others, everyone welcomed me as if I were part of the family. My first month in Romania was spent working hard and traveling a lot. We visited many different regions, met lots of people, organized workshops for children, and carried out projects for local artisans. I was deeply impressed by the talents and dedication of the other volunteers. 

We traveled to Iași by train, visited the French Institute's libraries, and connected with young people there. I was surprised to learn that many of them had a favorite Turkish TV series. I didn’t realize how popular Turkish series were here. We also visited galleries and exhibitions. My phone is now filled with photos of many impressive paintings. We decided to end the day at a restaurant near the train station, where we all had delicious shawarmas. I was exhausted by the end of the day, but I knew it was definitely worth it. I couldn’t wait to return to Iași. 

The next day, we went to Liceul Special “Moldova” and met many students. We told them about the workshops we were going to organize. Katrina and I planned to do storytelling. The children at the school were all very kind and talented. Two amazing students, Sara and Larisa, sang a Turkish song for me. Their accents were so perfect that I was shocked. 

Throughout the week, we worked with four students (including Sara and Larisa) on a story about the Holocaust that targeted Jews in Romania. Then Katrina and I turned the story into a comic. The comic-making part was a challenge for me because I wasn’t very skilled in Photoshop, but by the end of the project, I learned how to use many tools in the program, and we completed the comic.

In the following days, all the volunteers tried to fit into a minivan and headed to Todirești. We visited the Muzeul Etnografic GÂRBIA, and I loved it. I have great respect for Gârbia’s efforts and all the work he’s doing. He’s carrying out very important work for Romanian culture and traditions, but he feels that he isn’t getting enough support. Our whole team tried to change that for him. We did the same at Restaurant Îngerii Albaștri. But first, we enjoyed a lot of Romanian food, all of which was delicious. I’m so glad Romania has Sarmale because it’s one of my favorite dishes, and I start eating it immediately whenever I come across it. :)

Finally, there was a day when we had the chance to return to Iași. With a map in hand, we set out to explore galleries and exhibitions. We needed to visit nine galleries as part of an event. Before the adventure began, we stopped at a café. You could write or draw on the walls there. I was pleasantly surprised when Ella started drawing. We spent the rest of the night visiting a lot of exhibitions, though we couldn’t complete the entire list because some of them were too far away, and we were walking everywhere. We gathered plenty of memories and photos from that day. At the end of my month in Romania, we worked on the Folkloristica Festival and Tătăruși. On the first day in Tătăruși, they gave us a tour of the town. We visited a museum and a hill with an amazing view. We spent most of the day in a restaurant and, again, had incredible food. There, I faced a new challenge: drawing a postcard. Since all my designs are digital and 3D, I have a tendency to feel intimidated by paper and pencil. But by the end of the day, I completed a beautiful postcard of the Tătăruși landscape, and I was proud of myself. On the second day, Sona and I transformed a local story into a children’s tale and prepared a workshop for the after-school children. We read the story to them and asked them to draw pictures related to it. There was a dragon in the story called Zmei, but since Zmei also means "kite" in Romanian, some of the children drew kites instead of dragons, and I thought that was very funny. Later in the day, we returned to the festival area, where we watched a lot of folk dances and listened to songs from Romanian culture. The volunteers also went on stage to dance. Everyone had prepared either a song or a local dance from their own country. But since we ran out of time, I didn’t get a chance to perform my local dance on stage. The same thing happened to half of the team. I felt a bit disappointed, wishing the event schedule had been planned better. On the third day, folk dance teams from four different towns competed. We were asked to be the judges, scoring the towns in various categories. The folk dance teams were very talented—the children and young people had worked really hard. When the winner was announced, the team members started crying. You could see how important the victory was to them. Throughout the entire month, I fluctuated between curiosity, the excitement of discovering something new, the fear of whether I was good enough, and happiness. It was an exhausting month for me, but a good kind of exhaustion. It was the exhaustion of doing something and being part of something. It was definitely not the kind of exhaustion from stress and anxiety, and this made me happy. I tend to get stressed and overthink easily, but I didn’t experience any of those feelings throughout the month. I also started doing something difficult for me: journaling. I’m terrible at journaling and have never been able to keep it up once I start. But I managed to write about the entire month. I also have to mention that it makes me happy that most people at home are excited about Shrek. :) We recently started a Shrek marathon and watched the second one. So far, I’ve learned a lot about Romanian culture and people. I’ve discovered my creativity a bit more. I had the opportunity to try new things, both in the field of art and design and culturally. In the future, I want to carry the creative inspiration I’ve gained in art and design into my personal projects and workshops in a way that’s more beautiful and meaningful. I plan to block out negative thoughts as much as possible, and I definitely want to learn more Romanian.

Report written by Sinem Sağdıç, she's from Turkey 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.