Arts Lab 6.0: Nikola Svobodova - Month 3

It’s unbelievable how fast it is going. This is for me the third time writing this report, which means I have been here over 3 months.

This month started by finishing the MAF school residence. Me and Ella had 3 girls as the most frequent participants of the project. We created and painted folkloristic masks with them, and on the last day went on a trip to make a final photoshoot. We walked to the Buznea fields, which are beautiful green hills with shepherds and sheeps. We enjoyed taking pictures together and even took some photos just for the girls’ social media.

After the residence we started to think about our personal projects for the MAF exhibition. For inspiration we travelled to Ruginoasa. This day was the most snow we got here, so it was a really nice winter trip filled with snow fights and snowmen. This project inspired me to focus on Romanian nature, that is the biggest subject of motives for Romanian folklore.

I decided to create an abstract painting with beads, of different green shades, around it and sheep wool on it. Getting the sheep’s wool was the most challenging part. I had finished my painting and the last thing that was missing was the wool, then me and Ella remembered that while taking the pictures with the students in Buznea, we saw a shepherd with sheep on the hills. So we decided to go there and ask for some wool. Unfortunately when we climbed to the hill where we saw the sheep, they relocated them to the other side of the field across the water. But we had another plan. Under the hill, before hiking it, we heard a sheep that was calling us the whole time of going up the hill. We went back down to it and a few meters behind it heard man in a small hut, we spoke with them and found out that the sheep are from one of the guys. We spoke with them, they gave us some grilled potatoes with salt and then we went to cut the wool with them. That’s how I got the wool for my painting and also a memory of this trip.

Then the preparation for the exhibition began. I took the photos for the catalogue, edited them and then drew the cover for it. Creating the space and the whole exhibition was now so much easier, then the first time. The place was filled with more artworks and also the people we invited from Iasi that we met came, which was really nice.

Also across this whole month we are playing Secret Santa. At the start we blindly picked a person and created envelopes to put small gifts there. So far it’s going well :) . Also the Christmas atmosphere is finally here, the house is decorated with lights and in Iasi there is a Christmas market.

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.