Culture for Solidarity

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This workshop belongs to the proyect: Sanjomix

The participatory action research within Culture for Solidarity project aims at investigating forms of individual and collective solidarity, practiced by societies in five European contexts - in Poland, Spain, Croatia, Moldova and France, which manifest through cultural and artistic activities

Forms of Communing in the Age of Alienation. Dorota Ogrodzka and Igor Stokfiszewski __Forms of Communing in the Age of Alienation

After the first year of antropoloops Workshops work at CEIP San José Obrero with 5th grade students (2017-18), Zemos98 approached us with the possibility of participating in a European project they were developing together with Krytyka Polityczna (Poland) and the European Cultural Foundation (Netherlands): "Culture for Solidarity". The idea was to collaborate with Polish artist Sebastian Świąder by doing a workshop during the first quarter of the 2018-19 academic year, our second year of the project.

We were starting the year with an important change: instead of introducing a new secondary school year this year as planned, we decided to concentrate on working with the third cycle of primary school (5th and 6th). In this way we could continue working with the same students as last year, as suggested by the San José Obrero teaching team. So we thought that the global approach for these two courses could be: the 5th course is a year to reveal, explore and value, from the remix, the diversity of the classroom and the school, to ask ourselves where we come from and how our origin is diverse; after this first year, the 6th course would be a year to go out of the classroom and approach the musical diversity of other cultures and places through the idea of the trip. The workshop possibility for Culture for Solidarity fit very well with the 6th grade approach.

Working with Sebastian Świąder and Dorota and Igor (from Krytyka Polityczna) we decided to make a sound exchange between our students and the students of the Free Democratic School Bullerbyn in Warsaw, where Sebastian collaborates. We wanted to work on the approach to the "other" from the everyday in a sonorous way: what do we want to hear from the everyday environment of children living in another country, how do we present ourselves to others from the sonorous, how do we show our school from the sound?

The first part of the workshop took place in Seville. The experience of Sebastian and Fran from the theater and pedagogy, was fundamental to work the sound with the students from the corporal expression and the game, fomenting the active listening of our sonorous environment. The objective was to record a first message for the students of the Bullerbyn school in Warsaw.

Sebastian took to Warsaw a cassette tape with the sound presentation of our students recorded on side A, along with the questions they thought of for the children in Warsaw:

How does your School bell sounds like, How does your voice sounds like, How does your breathing sound, How does your teacher sound when he scolds you, How does your school sound, How does your house sound, How does your laughter sound, How does your favorite music sound, What does your classmates sound like in the courtyard?

Once in Warsaw, at the Free Democratic School Bullerbyn, Sebastian worked in a similar way with the students, who recorded a sound presentation of their class and questions addressed to the students in Seville on the B side of the cassette:

_What are the sounds of animals in Spain? I want to hear outside sounds from you. How does the wind sound to you, What do the leaves sound like in the rain? What do you play in Spain(games)? How does Spanish advertisement sound like (in radio, tv)? What song sometimes attach to your ear and you can't unhook it and you still have to sing it?

even questions came in for Halloween! how broken bones sound like? How death sound like? How the sinister laugh sound like?

The second part of the workshop consisted of answering the questions. The students from Warsaw recorded the answers to the questions asked by the students from Seville on side A of the tape, which flew back to San José Obrero with Dorota. Once in Seville, the answers were recorded on side B, and thus the tape returned to Warsaw with both sides full of questions and answers.

you can listen to the full cassette >> here

The workshops were conducted in a mixture of English, Spanish and Polish. From Seville, our students, fascinated by the sound of another language, played at imagining what the questions meant, and when they heard the answers they said: "they are just as crazy as we are! Listening to the sound of the chair concert at Bullerbyn School, I was struck by how different it sounded from ours, why? is the floor in their school made of wood, not terrazzo? From the chairs to the climatic difference in one listening jump?

To close the process, we had a videoconference with Sebastian before Christmas and congratulated each other for the new year.

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One of the objectives we have set ourselves this second year is to try to generate synergies in the school that go beyond the workshops. David, the physical education teacher, had made podcasts with his cell phone and this year he wanted to continue with the idea. We decided to allocate part of the Culture for Solidarity workshop budget and part of the Carasso materials budget that we had not spent last year, to buy recorders and materials to set up a recording studio for podcasts at the school.

After the experience with Sebastian we decided to end the term by making a podcast with the students in which they would tell how their experience had been. We worked in groups on the script, translation, handling the recording equipment and creating sound bites. Here is the result: broadcasting from Sanjomix to the whole galaxy...

You can listen to the podcast at the top of this page

At the end of the first quarter with the Culture for Solidarity workshop, seeing the students' responses and the feedback from the school's teaching team, the idea of these sound and music exchanges seems very interesting to continue developing it with other schools. Taking advantage of a previous collaboration channel of the school, we are going to continue the "journey" in the second term, through a collaboration with Tamer Özyurt İlköğretim school in Istanbul. The school is located in the Esenyurt district, in the European part of the city, an area with a lot of migrant population (Syria, Egypt, Congo, Iran). The goal is to make a musical exchange among the students: we are working on it. And maybe, at the end of the course, to make a remix piece between the students of Istanbul, Warsaw and Seville... Let's see!

podéis escuchar el cassete completo >> aquí

workshop in Sevilla

Podcast