"Imagine a friend, a counterpart to you in far away Finland, Imagine the looks of this friend, the things that she/he likes, where she/he studies, with whom she/he lives, where she/he studies, how she/he spends free time and so on and so forth. Now we need to recreate this FRIEND in the materials provided."
Initially there were questions as to how big the creation should be and depending on the materials we decided to make masks of the FINLAND Friends and improvise on them at a later point in time.
Project Implementation: Each student paired up with one teacher for assistance and worked on the masks. The discussions during the process of making the masks were quite interesting and revealing the thought processes of children involved. There were a lot of questions about Finland itself, how far it was, how big it was, and was it a cold country? And how tall were people etc, etc,. As a response to the queries, one teacher browsed the net for information on Finland andshared it with students. Students started to relate the conditions to their own context here and started the project on that note.
To read the full report on the workshop and to see pictures of the amazing artworks, please click here.
Leena Pascal and her talented group of artists and teachers at Praxis Foundation in Mysore, India are making and sharing art with Eliisa Sorvali and her artists at Annantalo in Helsinki, Finland.