Club de arte 2012!

Club de arte 2012 is well and truly underway!  We've completed our third week as sole facilitators... our pirate project climaxes next week with our obra de teatro (play), 'El Mito del Pirata tonto' (The myth of the silly Pirate).

I'm finding it hard to find enough hours in the day to keep up my correspondence with England AND sleep a sufficient amount.  Ask Alma (Mum), as she informed me this week I hadn't made contact with her since my birthday on the 5th January...oops...

But we have good reason to be busy, having kickstarted our Pirates project in early January.  We introduced large murals as our first excercise in encouraging collaboration and group work (Please see previous post with project objectives).

The pirate ship mural in Nueva Prosperina - we prepared a base image and colour, and the kids added the rest in the workshops.

We have weekly workshops in 4 different areas of the city (Barrios).  We made a different mural with each group, with a different main image - but all the murals have the same horizon point, so we can hang them together when the exhibition comes around... so ALL the groups have produced a collaborative work together.

Painting the murals in Balerio Estacio (L) and Fertisa (R).

In Balerio Estacio one kind family lets us hold art club in their garden every week!

The groups are large for art club at the moment, CMAP have a rule of no more than 25 attendees, but in reality many more community kids* have been coming along and facilitators with big hearts have found it impossible to turn the children away!  It is a great accolade to the workshops that so many kids come back week in week out, and encourage their friends to come too, but our capacity is not limitless and the more kids we have, the less 121 time we can spend with each of them.  This is a work in progress, and we are determined to solve this dilemma!  In the mean time, however, we have had to split the group so half works with Chloe on making stick-on elements for the mural, whilst the other half paint the mural with me... in following weeks the groups will swap so everybody gets a turn.

(Finished mural photos coming soon!)

*1.  Community kids, meaning children who are not associated with or supported by the JUCONI charity, but nevertheless live in the same slum area, may be street-working, and have very little opportunity to partake in art activities or any extra-curricular clubs.