Back to School: MANIFESTA 10 Workshops for School Children
For about two months after MANIFESTA 10’s opening in late June its target-audiences consisted mainly of Russian or foreign tourists and locals. Then all of a sudden, at the beginning of September, we as art-mediators had to switch from adult groups to an avalanche of school children. In addition to or even instead of the mediated tour - we were also supposed to deliver so-called workshops to the children. For someone like me, unfamiliar with practical art making, it seemed a real challenge. But gradually, and with the help from the kids, I came to realise that our mutual goal is educational, and that the point was not to create meticulously executed masterpieces, but rather to learn new things about the artists and their practices by doing and experimenting.
In my amateurish opinion, even with children it is important to establish some chronological and terminological frames of the show — for them to understand and begin applying words like ‘biennial’, ‘group exhibition’, ‘contemporary art’, ‘medium’, ‘materials’ and others. Therefore, the creative part of such tours often implies discussion — before we proceed to crafting any objects. In the latter case though, handmade collages, drawings, textiles, etc. may be extremely helpful in getting acquainted with the techniques preferable by certain artists, as well as remembering some of the exhibition's themes.
One interesting thing that cropped up while attempting to develop the aforementioned art vocabulary together was the fact that many kids would really like to know the artist’s name and country of origin — but very few of them are used to reading the labels in the rooms. Drawing their attention to such elements of the show, for example by asking the group to find the necessary information themselves, playfully introduces young visitors to the ABC of museum-going, so that in the next rooms they start looking for panels, captions and other supporting material without being prompted.
After working out these basic skills, we move on to examining the piece on display and share our own, often very different, interpretations of what we see in the process. The workshop usually ties together the looking and discursive parts. I have found that children aged from 8 to 12 respond very enthusiastically to the format of collage which combines practical and theoretical issues: the group gathers in the space and collectively conceives a work on paper, using pictures of the artist and his /her project for MANIFESTA 10. We repeat this scenario in the rest of the rooms on our route, with the resulting designs becoming more and more original and playful. In the end, young audiences, unaccustomed to contemporary art, leave the exhibition with handmade objects that document their first ever encounter therewith. Which, in many ways, is the most pleasurable educational achievement for an art-mediator.
By M10 Art-Mediator Natasha Soboleva