Arts Lab 6.0: Sona Tamrazyan - Month 2

Week 1

We opened this month’s first week with French night, it was really exciting to have the first intercultural night after Romanian. We had soooo many fun activities and of course yummy foods. Apparently I had no idea about French traditions, it was a very informative night. Thank you Ella and Savane, everything was organized perfectly.

Autumn Festival in the House of Culture, more workshops with kids, we had a lot of fun. Me, Sinem and Soukaina were making crowns from  leaves and helping the kids to make their own. We finally felt the autumn coming.

The week was full of organizing, paperworks and personal artwork. Besides the Jemom catalogue I decided to make an installation as my artwork. It was full of disappointing moments but I didn't want to give up. It was my first installation so I was asking for opinions, changing a lot of things and not being shy to ask for help. In the end it came out a bit different than I expected but I was happy with the results. 

Workshop in Iași. I think this was the most challenging day of the month for me. 90 kids at school, after sleepless nights was exhausting. But I found a way to interact with 10-15 year old teenagers successfully, I treated them as adults and opened deep conversations. By my surprise they became serious and opened up. Definitely will use this technique for later workshops :)

Our First Exhibition. We were so excited and nervous. The room organization started a day before and we planned very quickly. Everything went smoothly, it showed the soul of the team, I felt really proud of us.

Week 2

We sent Ella and Rahaf to Bucharest for the Jewish Film Festival, to present our project and the exhibition. Everybody was working hard. I improved the catalogue for our next exhibition. Compared to last week, it was more organized and we had more free time to relax, so we decided to catch the moment and went to the Halloween party in Iași. :) 

Exhibition and conference in Iași. This felt so professional and we all were nervous. So many people. I think we did great. There were architects, archaeologists, artists, teachers and funders, in one word important people, they were interested and once more I felt really proud of our team and Mihaela.

Week 3

Mihaela found the way to clean the cemetery after long discussions. We also wanted to help with it, and decided to scan all the tombstones that were hiding in the bushes. So we searched for a program then went with small teams everyday to scan. We tried to scan as much as the other volunteers managed to clean. It was going fast but we still have a lot to do.

Art Caravan to Bacău. At this time workshops were much easier as long as the youngsters were older and more mature. Me, Katrina and Luca did storytelling with Dixit cards, it was nice, we collected a lot of creative and deep stories. 

The week was closed with Syrian night. One of my favorite cuisines. A lot of dances and games. Thank you Rahaf for the interesting exchange.

Week 4

So the week is not finished yet, but the beginning was very promising. Our room is in charge of the fire. I have never heated the house with fire technique. At the beginning it was scary, we were so confused and asked a lot of stupid questions (thank you Kristers for being a patient teacher). A day later it became a fun activity for our room, also a good workout.

One more exhibition will be planned for the Moldova school students who helped us with our artworks, to go deep in the topic. We will finish the Jemom project after that. It was full of obstacles but we are much stronger and organized now. 

We entered the week with the new school residency. The next museum is Folklore (MAF). This morning we visited Liceul Tehnologic Petru Rareș Târgu Frumos to promote our workshops. These teenagers are full of energy. Luca had the idea of designing playing cards, so I wanted to join her, and we will be doing the workshop together. Of course, we learned a lot from the other workshops, but every new school has new challenges.

Tonight we scheduled the whole workshop and divided it by days, made up some fun games and crafty activities. Hopefully everything will go as planned.

Fingers crossed :) 

Report written by Sona Tamrazyan, she's from Armenia 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.