In this weekly blog, we explore a captivating photography workshop and exhibition that took place on July 1st. The workshop was part of a project called ArtLiD that we have with our partners from Poland and it brought to our ARThub Madeira 16 talented young photographers from Poland.
ArtLiD aims to provide opportunities for emerging artists to connect, develop projects, and showcase their art both online and in real settings.
This project is an initiative that welcomes creative minds from all over Europe. We believe in the power of artistic collaboration and its ability to bring communities together and connect people from different backgrounds. Inspired by a similar workshop by our Spanish partners in a project called nARTure, we aimed to create a similar experience infused with unity and shared moments.
Through the art of visual storytelling and photography, we discovered that despite our different locations, we have many things in common even if our traditional customs, nature, and personalities may be diverse. With this in mind, we had quite a journey to showcase these parallel experiences, together with our beautiful Polish photographer, Karolina.
Without further ado, in the following few lines, you can read her own thoughts and perspective for the whole experience.
Photography exhibition workshops took place on the 1st of July. The main goal was to provide young people with knowledge regarding the process of creating an exhibition. By participating in both individual and group activities, they learned about curatorship and all actions connected with it. Through working with their photographs, they got to know the value of constructive criticism and well-prepared photo selection. All activities were based on Madeira-related concepts.
The workshops were divided into four stages: curatorship, individual activity, group activity, and exhibition.
The first part was a detailed discussion of the idea of curatorship. Throughout the conversation, we established what tasks belong to a curator. The participants showed their deep knowledge regarding this subject. After this part, we were well-prepared to move on with creating our exhibition.
The idea of the workshop was to show the participants the path of individual art projects turning into collaborative exhibitions. Therefore the next part was all about working on solo projects. My approach was to teach participants how to discover hidden concepts and symbols in photographs. Each person got their concept connected with Madeira; its beauty, community, customs, and traditions. Then they needed to think about a parallel situation in Polish culture. Based on that, from all photographs that had been printed before they got to choose some fitted to their concept. The key to choosing photos was also an important part of the workshops. I wanted them not to think so illustrative about photography, I prefer if they focus more on exploring the concept and finding the way it can be shown by pictures not strictly related to them. After focusing on our individual art project it was time to explore the possibilities of collaboration.
They formed groups of 3/4 people based on the familiarity of their concepts. In those groups, they focused on finding a common theme for their exhibition. After establishing the main idea, they wrote it down as a statement. All things had been prepared by then and we could have moved to create the exhibition.
We set up four small exhibitions that were connected to a bigger one. The main title of the exhibition is Paralelo Polska.
Its goal is to present Madeira customs using parallel Polish situations. This way we showed the connection between those two places. Even though more than three thousand kilometers are separating those two places, Polish people can find a lot of similarities here. The beautiful nature with mountains (we do love them in Poland!), regional food, and attachment to folk and traditions. All of those became concepts for our exhibition.
In my opinion, I'm extremely satisfied with the results of this workshop. I could see that everyone was engaged in participation and they perfectly understood the idea of working with concepts.
You can check out the results by yourself. They are waiting for you on the walls of our gallery!
