Arts Lab 6.0: Savanephone Riand - Month 3

This month passed so fast that I don’t remember all the things we did. By the beginning of this month, we had our last exhibition about the Jemom museum at the Moldova school, with the kids we worked with. It was really nice to see them again, we could have heard what they thought about this residence and how it was for them to work with us.

Then we started to work on the second museum which is the Folklore one. It was one of the most anticipated museums for me so I worked a lot for it. During this theme we learned a lot about Romanian Folklore which is very full of legends, stories and characters. We also had our second residence with the school of Petru Rares. At first I thought it was going to be really hard to work with them, I didn’t feel very welcome, and I didn’t like the boys’ behaviour. But when we started to really work and we had kids attending our workshop, I saw a lot of talented kids that just needed a bit of attention and creativity. Even the ones I thought were going to be tough, they ended up being really nice kids, and I enjoyed working with each one of them. It was kind of not really organised but we managed. For this residence we made a board game mixing clay and drawings, and I didn’t know I could do this. For my personal artwork I also worked a lot on a visual novel game, and I have always wanted to do this but it was my first time, even if the people didn't really understand some stuff I enjoyed doing it and I will do more games like this in the future.

We went to Ruginoasa, a little village not far from Targu Frumos, we saw the place for our future exhibition and we learned a lot about the folklore of this village.

We had a small workshop in Iasi, with an association for the protection of minors, and it changed a lot from the Petru Rares school. It was mostly girls, most of them spoke English and they were really into the workshop, very polite, and they welcomed us very well.

Then we had our first exhibition about this museum, and we had so many people, so much more than the first exhibition. I love everyone’s artwork and I love to see what they create. People enjoyed my game because I did everything from the drawings to the music but some of them didn’t understand the endings. 

We also had a small event in the house of culture, with an association that gives presents for the kids in poor situations or with disabilities, and it was one of the cutest moments I have seen in this project. I saw a lot of these kids in the streets or Targu Frumos, some of them attending our outside workshops, and it was really nice to see them receive gifts and sing songs so shyly. 

At the end of this period, we had to do the Christmas market to raise funds for the association. To be honest it was really hard for our team to earn money (we didn’t even get one lei) because no one really paid attention to our stuff, it was Sunday, and even if they were looking they just passed by without saying anything. But it was a great experience, I’ve always wanted to earn money in this way, but maybe in the future, I’d like to do more street/music performances, than just selling stuff. 

The days pass so fast here, we are already in the middle of this project and we are already thinking of what we will do in the next months, sometimes I feel like the project will end very soon, even if we still have four more months to experience here. The more the days pass, the more we become famous in this small town. Every time I go shopping, walk my dog, or just go out, I end up saying hi to so many kids, sometimes teachers. I hope they will remember us in a good way and that the art we bring to them will make them more creative. 

Report written by Savanephone Riand, she's from France 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.