Workshop 8
COMMEMORATION – A COLLECTIVE WORK OF ART
Workshop facilitators: Atalya Laufer & Sofiia Holubeva
I am David Kach, 18 years old, from Israel. In my free time, I often paint, so when the opportunity to choose a workshop based on creativity and art appeared to me, I had to take it. Nevertheless, I didn’t stop at simply selecting it as my first choice — I also wrote that I would really appreciate participating in this specific workshop. On the first day, I met our two facilitators – Atalia and Sofiia. Atalia is an Israeli-German artist who works primarily in Berlin, and Sofiia is a Ukrainian artist whose exhibitions are based on Ukraine, often focusing on everyday life and war. The work on the workshop did not commence on the first day, because we spent that day getting to know all the participants and finding connections between us. I remember this activity vividly: we rolled a ball covered in paint across a large sheet of paper and said the name of the person we passed it to. This activity helped me remember everyone’s names, which made connecting with them easier. The whole program revolved around May 8th, with the evening ceremony taking place at the Centre Français de Berlin. And like any good ceremony, it needed a good design. Our workshop created the set for the ceremony. There were many artworks that symbolized various aspects of peace — just as Picasso transformed the dove of peace into the purest symbol of the tran- quility found in peace in his illustration for the 1949 Paris Peace Congress.
My teammate Olga and I made a white dove symbol- izing peace and tranquility. Our dove was center stage at the ceremony as it was for me the whole week. Olga called the dove “our baby,” which shows how emotion- ally invested we were in it. Luckily, our “baby” survived after the conference. A kind facilitator from another team asked if she could take it with her to place on the shores of the Black Sea, a region struck by war since Putin’s invasion of Crimea in March 2014. Knowing that our artwork would continue its journey beyond the conference made me feel that our message of peace had truly reached beyond the City Kino of the Centre Francais de Berlin.
Author: David Kach, Israel
Link to Website
33
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs