Art and Photography
This year's Art and Photography workshop was all about the motto „Get alive“.
On the first day we translated the motto in the different languages. In Dutch it is „Zoek Een Leven“, German is „Werde Lebendig“ and in Spanish „Despierta“ (which actually means „Wake Up“). After that we were separated in four groups, working on different tasks that should all expressed the motto or its translations. Group 1 worked with coloured lights and formed the letters with their bodies. Group 2 cut the motto out of paper and used the sunlight to create shadows. Group 3 used the darkroom and Group 4 searched for things in the nature that looked like letters and recreated the motto with the help of them afterwards.
On Tuesday we formed new groups, which caused that we met different people and worked together with them. This time we did body painting, which turns neon when you lighten it with UV-lights in the darkroom. We took pictures of ourselves and achieved very good results. On the same day we also started our banners for the final ceremony on Friday. They were about five meters long and had to be painted with the motto until the end of the week so that we could hang them in school. One group decided to lie down on the fabric and form the letters with their body shapes. Another group used their footprints to create it. After that we used acrylic colours to paint them in bright colours.
All the ROTA students spent their Wednesday in the city of York, so we were not able to work on our projects for one day. It took about two hours to go to York by bus and at first we all visited the York Minster, which is one of the most magnificent cathedrals in the world. Afterwards we were free to spend the rest of the day with activities like shopping and visiting museums or other sights in York.
The following day we were working on our banners and did some other photographs in the darkroom.
On Friday we finally finished our banners and did some animations with the photos, we took over the whole week, to present them at the final ceremony in the evening. After the banners were dry we hang them on different walls in the school and were really impressed of them. They were enormous and they all looked pretty amazing. We also printed the best photographs and pictures of each group to present them, too.
In our opinion the reactions of the parents and other people who saw the work, we did during the week, were very positive, too.
In general it is to say that we really liked the Art and Photography workshop. The different activities were big fun and it was really interesting to work in the dark room or with other methods, most of the students did not work with before. The different teachers that led the workshop were very nice and friendly and planned it very well. Especially meeting so many new people was the best thing about ROTA and in terms of this the workshop was more than helpful. Because of working in groups that changed everyday and the relaxed atmosphere, everybody automatically made new friends or at least talked to the other group members. The tasks every group worked on were also well chosen because we always needed to help each other and plan a lot of things before we could start photographing which is not working without talking to each other. And because of all this reasons we were very happy to be part of ROTA and the Art and Photography workshop this year and would really like to do this exchange for a second time.
Nadine Hennlich