EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES FOR SECONDARY SCHOOL CHILDREN AS PART OF THE EXHIBITION
February 1, 2018
Two excursions took place at the Latvian National Museum of Art, which were organised with the support of the ABLV Charitable Foundation under the auspices of the programme “Educational Projects with Cultural Content”, in which the participants were the winners of the memory notebook competition organised in December: Jelgava Spīdola Gymnasium’s Class 12 and Riga 71st Secondary School’s Class 12. During the excursions, both classes were introduced to the world before the digital age. They also received the main prize in the form of the opportunity to shoot their own film, under the tutelage of professionals, using analogue special effects.
In collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, from 8 December 2017 to 4 February 2018, the ABLV Charitable Foundation organised an international exhibition "You’ve Got 1243 Unread Messages. The Last Generation Before the Internet. Their Lives" at the Latvian National Museum of Art. Under the auspices of the project, a wide-ranging educational programme for secondary school children and their teachers was implemented. One of the programme activities was a competition held in December in which all of Latvia’s secondary school children were invited to take part.
Under the auspices of the competition, secondary school classes jointly created a work of art entitled "Memory Notebook", which they could produce in traditional form of notebook, book or album, as well as an art or documentary film, song, game, animation, object, poster, poem, story or in any other form that the class could imagine and create in accordance with its vision. Moreover, the approach to the task could be variable, ranging from a personal dedication to a sociological study about a certain subject (similar to once popular questionnaire forms), ranging from a collation of the first childhood memories of classmates to an imaginary story or film about a notebook of memories.
The submitted works were judged in three categories: originality of the idea, quality of execution and joint participation of the whole class in the project. The competition jury was comprised of actress Guna Zariņa, artist Kristiāns Brekte, conductor Normunds Šnē and poet Inga Gaile.
The jury’s highest recognition was awarded to two classes: Jelgava Spīdola Gymnasium’s Class 12 and Riga 71st Secondary School’s Class 12, whose prize was comprised of the chance to take part in a guided tour of the exhibition, and to participate in an analogue film special effects workshop, where pupils were introduced to the approaches that are used to credibly present unbelievable events on screen. How do you film the sinking of the Titanic, a bus crash or a flying superhero? Can you do it all on a computer or do you need to use other cunning tricks? In the workshop, the winning classes will build models, act, shoot film, arrange lighting and edit their chosen film under the guidance of professionals.
Thank you to all the secondary school class teams that took part in the competition. Like the overall education project organised as part of the exhibition, "You’ve Got 1243 Unread Messages. The Last Generation Before the Internet. Their Lives", the creative workshops were organised under the auspices of the ABLV Charitable Foundation programme “Educational Projects with Cultural Content”. With the help of the programme, we want to foster appreciation among both children and adults of the museum as a captivating and stimulating environment for self-development. We also wish to encourage involvement in culture as part of the process of acquiring a general education. We encourage everyone interested in our future education activities to follow the news on our social media accounts: Facebook and Instagram, where we regularly publish news about forthcoming contemporary art exhibitions in Latvia and education projects organised under their auspices.