This spring, Something Collective produced their first interactive theatre show for young audiences. Here’s a short preview!
Captain Creative Saves the Day is an arts advocacy performance that encourages kids not only to appreciate the value of art in community, but to take part and make art themselves! Look how much fun they had!
The show is about 45 minutes including a performance that leads to audience participation and a discussion / Q & A.
Today, after three days of installation, we finally finished our moss graffiti project on the walls of the Sunset Community Centre. This is one of the 5 components that are part of the We Are Here mapping project, and a result from the community engagement with the South Hill Education Centre and the Chaos Boys Club.
Today I also had the chance to share our experience with 47 kids ages 5 to 12 from the Day Camp that was held during the summer at Sunset.
It was an amazing experience to facilitate this process, work with these culturally diverse groups of people and participate in making their projects come to life.
Please come and visit Sunset Community Centre to see this moss graffiti project and spray the green living art work on the walls to keep it alive!
We are having a great time with the youth from the Chaos Boys Club that regularly meets at Sunset Community Centre. For the last two weeks we have been working on the development of the proposal for the moss graffiti project that is going to be installed on the north facing wall of the Sunset Community Centre.
After having a participatory process where the kids identified or “mapped” how their community has shaped them and how they are shaping it, including different cultural, social and environmental issues present in their neighbourhood, they split into small groups to start visually developing different proposals for their mural project.
We also had a photo shoot portrait session where they did their best pose trying to represent their different proposals.
Stay tuned for more updates!
There has been a debate in the media about the abrupt termination of the moss graffiti project I started on July 23rd with the art class group at the South Hill Education Centre, as one of the components of our We Are Here Community Mapping Project:
http://blogs.canoe.ca/davidakin/energy/todays-lesson-pipelines-are-evil/
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/07/30/vancouver-graffiti-artist-dismissed-from-mural
http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/News/local/2012/07/30/20045756.html
After having two inspiring sessions with the students, where the participants had the chance to identify or “map” different issues of their individual and collective concern present in their community/neighbourhood, along with a great photo-shoot session, the group agreed on presenting 5 different proposals that were intended to be installed in one of the walls of the Sunset Community Centre using the moss graffiti technique.
After presenting them during the second session, they concluded with one great proposal that included one of the portraits taken during the first session and a tag line or message reflecting on the common environmental issues addressed somehow in all the small group proposals pitched before: “How green are you?”
Even though the project was stopped before its completion, I would like to continue working with this amazing group of students that generated a very interesting moss graffiti mural proposal, and extend an open invitation to each one of the participants to complete this project outside their art class schedule and outside the South Hill art class curriculum.
I really value, respect the community art process the students already started and think their participation is very important until the full completion of the project they were invited to actively take part on.
Juliana Bedoya