Youth Projects

Workshop: Fantastic beings

Method: Seven Step Configuration Analysis Towards Photography: understanding the personality behind photographs

Place: Academia de Música de Costa Cabral

This workshop took place on the 12th and the 13th of December, at the “Academia de Música de Costa Cabral”, with two groups of kids, with ages amongst 9 and 10 years old.

I’ve been working with these kids, as their art Teacher. I came to notice that after almost three months after school started, some of them still don’t know each other. I know there are also some problems between some of the kids, so I thought about a workshop based of the value of kindness, where they could get to know more about each other and get in touch with their own creativity.

To start, the name of each kid was written in a piece of paper that was folded and kept in a bag. Later everyone would take a piece out of it and find a name from another kid, which anybody couldn’t share.

Second it was asked that they wrote on a bigger paper some qualities they could relate to that person. In this phase, some of them found out how little they about their person-subject and they had to do the exercise with the help of other colleges.

The third step was to think of a Fantastic Being that would have that same quality and answer some questions about it:

– What’s its name?

– Where does it live?

– What does it eat?

– Describe its relationship with Human beings.

The fourth step was to bring this being to life. Surprisingly this was the most difficult step for some of the kids. None of the had a hard time thinking about its factual description but when it came to develop a mental image of something they could copy from the physical and material world, some kids experience something I would describe as a “creative block”. It was avoided by making some small changes to animals or objects they knew.

The rest of the kids where excited to draw these beings and the scenarios place where they live. Some of them even came up with different options before finding the final drawing.

The final step was to cut the drawing, glue it in a stick to make a little puppet and finally offer to the person-subject of the work. This was a fun phase, the kids where happy about offering something they had done themselves and they made some little improvised plays with each other.