Culture Clubs

I tried to make the clubs more interactive and creative, that’s why except usual discussions I tried to make some manual exercises, most often drawing. Of course not everyone is an artist, but it is not a point in such exercises. The main aim is to develop creativity and make adults do something unusual, use imagination. I tried; don’t know with what success, to make art more accessible and not boring, the point was to talk about art without a lot of specialistic knowledge and big words.  I’ll try to summarize what we have done during these 8 months now.

In the beginning we discussed what is culture and art in general, what our personal definitions of these concepts are and what functions of art are. Then, what makes a work of art a work of art using as example pictures of different items, some not very obvious:

After this, we discussed portraits from different centuries and different movements. First we talked how we would like to be portrayed and

Next club was about conceptual art, we saw the works of Joseph Kossuth “One and Three chairs”, who challenged the authority of art institutions, John Baldessori “I will not make any more boring art”, who just provided the idea and made others do the work – if he can be the artist still? And, finally, Sol Le Witt, who was just writing the instructions how to create the paintings.

Then my favorite topic-impressionism. On this club we used the 30 seconds method of watching art – participants had 30 seconds to look at the pictures and then to say their first impressions,  first things they noticed, we saw pictures of Monet, Degas and others French impressionists.

After one whole club was devote to emotions in art – in what way feeling can be put into the paintings (colors, lines), how different colors make you feel like.

One club was dedicated to politics, more precisely to political cartoons and guessing the messages they are hiding.

We haven’t discussed only visual art on clubs but also theater. I tried to show to my participants some examples of absurdist theater and we saw  the extracts from "Waiting for Godot" by Becket. It wasn't very successful club as I think its hard to understand that absurd in literature has a bit different meaning than the one we know from everyday life. One participant even told me that what I'm showing  has nothing to do with absurd:)

"We wait. We are bored. No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!"

 "Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To allmankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!" 

 Second theatrical club was dedicated to Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice".After not very successful attempts to watch a movie, I decided to make people familiar with this play in another way - they had to introduce themselves as main characters and tell the others their stories on the basis of short biographical notes, and after this we could analyse a bit the plot and even draw some characters:

Once we came back to our childhood a bit and were reading fairy-tales from other cultures (Jewish and African).

From other visual art topics we learnt about romanticism in art in different European countries (Turner, Goya, Delacroix, allegories in XVIII and contemporary art and tried to guess allegorical symbols for classical virtues and vices (for example, sloth -computer or sofa as some ideas of my participants), Frida Kahlo's autobiographical art of pain. 

I liked especially 3 clubs:

• discussion about Islamic women artists - when we saw the works of Shirin Neshat, Iranian artist whose main topic are women and islamic tradition, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1997.129.8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCAssCuOGls I storngly recommend seeing these works and watch her short movies
• Language as art, on this club we got to know works of American neoconceptualist artist Jenny Holzer  and tried to think about messages her works sent to the public and discuss general function of such type of art. Here some examples:

DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS DISORGANISATION IS A KIND OF ANESTHESIA DON'T PLACE TOO MUCH TRUST IN EXPERTS DON'T RUN PEOPLE'S LIVES FOR THEM DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES  

DREAMING WHILE AWAKE IS A FRIGHTENING CONTRADICTION  

PEOPLE ARE BORING UNLESS THEY'RE EXTREMISTS PEOPLE ARE NUTS IF THEY THINK THEY ARE IMPORTANT PEOPLE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT THEY DO UNLESS THEY'RE INSANE PEOPLE WHO DON'T WORK WITH THEIR HANDS ARE PARASITES PEOPLE WHO GO CRAZY ARE TOO SENSITIVE PEOPLE WON'T BEHAVE IF THEY HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE  

http://www.emptykingdom.com/featured/inflammatory-essays-jenny-holzer/

• final club when we played old games from around the world, games are homemade, for two and I recommend for everyone who is bored, it's great fun and more interesting than spending your evening on a couch in front of tv;) http://www.ecola.com.pl/tabula-lusoria

Among creative activities we made during the clubs was story telling (in pairs invent a story on basis of 3 modern art pictures), creating poems – about yourself, what you would like your eyes to tell the world about you, about something that makes you happy or frightens you and about one or all the four seasons, and drawing and painting:

• Exercise to mind a gap - joining in creative way two object on paper,
• Painting concepts – 3 papers with noun, verb and concept written on them, participants have to draw these words and make others guess what they are
• abstract lines drawing – using only abstract lines create a design that would represent the following concepts: a sound of approaching train, a taste of hot paper, a smell of a fresh baked apple pie, feeling of loneliness, a feel of a cat’s fur, a sound of an alarm clock at 5.30 am
• group drawing - exquisite corpse and doodling together
• negative thinking exercise - drawing with eraser 
• discover the famous places - participants get 3 pieces of paper with words, first is famous place or object (Big Ben, Colosseum etc), two others are the verb (crawl, scratch) and the item, object (wild roses, rubbish), they have to draw one picture from this.

Photos from some of the clubs:

and photos of our works of art ;)

Thank you to all my participants, for all discussions and your creativity!

Some links to topics and works we discussed:

http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/classroom_resources/curricula/portraits/index.html

https://www.boundless.com/art-history/thinking-and-talking-about-art/what-is-art/what-does-art-mean/

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/22/what-is-art/

http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/conceptual-art/language-and-art

http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/classroom_resources/curricula/impressionism/lesson_plan_index.html

http://www.enotes.com/topics/waiting-for-godot

http://www.oxfordartonline.com/public/page/lessons/mai_7_5

http://www.worldoftales.com/

European Club

Today I would like to write more about  our work here. First post will be about European club we lead in the library. First about difficulties in leading such club. The name of the club is very general, so from one point it let you be creative and doesn’t “lock” you in some topic, or some scenarios and objectives. But there is one big disadvantage - it is so unclear that its hard to invent some plan and topics. Generally the aim is to talk about different mobility programs for youth, cultural and social life of youth in EU. Cultural and social life...honestly when you are a citizen of a country you don't think about it much, everything is normal, not very interesting to share, because you think people in other countries do similar things (which is mostly true). And are we aware what is it like in other european countries? not really. Europe is too varied to know everything when you don't live in a concrete country. Mobility programs… thats clear, but it can be shared during one or two sessions..and we have same participants each week. What to do then? Now, Ill try to summarise what we have done.

First club was very stressful. However, idea on topic appeared very quickly, from the first days we were asking what we are doing here and the word “volunteer” didnt explain anything, as if it was said in Chinese, what's more even after explaining very thoroughly what is our mission, people couldn't understand it, so we decided to explain who are EVS volunteers and why we could go abroad. So our first club was about EVS programme. A lot of people came, it didn't make it easier to lead, I remember I was very scared. We also didn't have any good experience in facilitating such club, our leaders skills were 0.00% (I can say it from perspective of few months). We did it more like simple lecture and that wasn’t best idea, too little involvement from participant side. It isnt easy at all to present information in creative way to make people involve….

So after this not very fortunate session, we lea one more about the european programmes, different volunteering possibilities within other programs, this one was better prepared, with less stress and nicer results. After these first struggles our work became more and more interesting and easy. We still have problems with picking the topics, as we would like to raise discussions on issues which are also interesting to the participants and concern them in some way. Our aim is also to show the point of view which our societies have.

To present shortly the topics we analysed with our participants

• human rights (few clubs with interactive exercises, which let us and participants think more thoroughly about our rights and different aspects and situations connected with them),
• citizenship (where we first raise the topic of ideal citizen’s characteristic and what it means to belong to the country, what are the aspects of being a good citizen and then we played the board game which concerns this topic and shows some mechanisms of society), 
• stereotypes (funny discussion and drawing activity which presented out stereotypes about different nations, and the possible result of stereotyping), 
• death penalty (this topic isn't that much connected with  Europe, but important in world, so we decided to lead discussion about it and it finished by movie club,when we watched “Dead man walking”), 
• homosexuality (issue which is very “hot” in many european countries, we made few activities to discover attitude of Ukrainians to this issue and share the results of similar discussions in our countries), 
• presentation about our countries (short quiz about basic information and cultural and historical facts about France and Poland), finally
• gender roles (answering the question what is gender, what are our rights and what are the stereotypes of women and men taught us from childhood and what image of men and women present media and adverts)
• language barrier and intercultural communication (we learnt how communication can look like when we cannot find common language, how to break language barrier and how the language can show the nature of nations).

All materials can be easily find on the Internet, here I will give some links:

https://www.salto-youth.net/tools/toolbox/search/

http://www.amnesty.org.uk and other websites of amnesty

http://www.eurodesk.org/edesk/EUToolbox.do?go=4

Internet is full of different materials, so if you have concrete idea you can always find some help. And very good idea is talking with other volunteers - it always may bring many various creative ideas!

And finally some photos from our clubs:

New Year in Ukraine

This year first new year party was on…23 December. We celebrated it in our organization Pangeya Ultima, the early date was chosen because there was last week of clubs. It was also a farewell with old office of Pangeya Ultima (from the New year all clubs are moved to other places). There was a lot of fun, good laugh and positive atmosphere. We were singing, some was playing the guitar, and we were playing some games. Each of us had a task to do, some were very trivial ones, some more creative and complex. For example Daphne had to teach us a game, it is called Spanish telephone, we played it on on-arrival training and again it  caused some problems in understanding because of Spanish words. In fact knowing that language doesn’t matter, because you don’t say anything meaningful, and the sound effect is nicer and funnier in Spanish, in English there is no sound-game:)
We had also s costume contest, you can see on  pictures below that some people were very creative:








In this part of the world, people celebrate more likely New Year than Christmas, and they do it in different way than in Poland for example (and other European countries I guess), for us its a time for big party and everyone feels the pressure to do something interesting and unusual that day, or at least not stay at home alone, and here its more a family holiday. Perhaps its because the previous atheistic epoch, when people weren’t celebrating Christmas.
And finally the proper New Year, which this time brought me greatest present and brightest emotions. For the first time I celebrated it like I wanted and always wished, and as Em not very willing to share my very private life here, I will stop here. Just want to thank one  person for making this beginning of year special. And if its like in this saying that the whole year will be like the New Years/like you celebrate New Year, I’m already happy:)

First Christmas abroad

Christmas time... For the first time not in Poland, first time not with the family, first time not feeling pre-Christmas and Christmas atmosphere (orthodox Christmas are on 7 January, and people here celebrate more New Year than Christmas). I wasn’t thinking about Christmas before as I knew from the beginning that I will be in Ukraine and I’m not coming back home. Daphnee also stayed and we decided to organize Christmas to feel more like at home.

We bought Christmas tree, then had a lot of fun making the decorations by ourselves (as I said we are still children in our souls :P). Then the most frightening day Christmas Eve, I say frightening because I was afraid how I will feel for the first time without closest people. But actually I didn’t have time to think, because I was too busy with cooking all Polish Christmas specialities. I am so proud of myself, I did everything for the first time absolutely alone and it was eatable. With dumplings I wouldn’t manage on time if not my great helpers – Daphnee and Daniel, our homemade pierogi were almost perfect :D

Our Christmas Eve was international, for the first time in my life. French, Ukrainian and Polish. I’m not religious, and this holiday doesn’t have a religious, or spiritual meaning for me (and honestly it was better without prayers, reading the Bible and all religious accents this time), but it is important day for me, I think for all Polish people it’s the same. And being alone, maybe not alone but just separated from country and family is very hard, normally I call my parents once per week, during Christmas period each second day. For my parents for sure it was much more difficult, for the first time they were alone, without me or my brother. But let’s finish this melancholy. This was great evening and I had some Polish aspect as another Polish EVS volunteer –Daniel accepted my invitation for Christmas and came to us from Kharkiv. For this occasion he even widens his cooking abilities and prepared noodles with mushrooms himself. I think that in total we have even traditional 12 dishes (if counting cakes and water :D)

I think Poland is the only country (if it isn’t true, I’m sorry for my ignorance and lack of knowledge, but for sure people from Western Europe don’t do it) where people before Christmas supper share the wafer and say wishes to each other (the symbol of bread, forgiveness, willing to be together).  Generally I think it is very nice tradition, but I don’t like it that much as mostly it looks very “artificial” not honest. But of course we had to show this tradition to foreigners, and they liked it very much, so it was quite nice this year.

Unfortunately we missed the mass at midnight (pasterka) which we didn’t know about, and it was even in Polish language, and it would be very good to walk to the center after such gluttony :D

Our Christmas supper – Polish beetroot soup with dumplings called uszka, dumplings (pierogi), Polish version of kutia, herring salad, noodles with mushrooms (Toruń speciality)  and paella made by French “organizers”

And our "Christmas family", from the left Yarik, Dima, Daphnee and Leo, Masha and me. On the picture below Daniel on the left.