Living Together in Georgia: Workshop for Artists

Iniva is working with artists Monica de Miranda and Gayle Chong Kwan to deliver artist-led workshops in Georgia as part of Living Together.  

A total of nine artists from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia participated in a workshop, which aimed at providing them an opportunity to experiment, collaborate and develop new work in a mutually supportive environment. Encouraging both the practical exchange of ideas as well as thinking through notions of 'home', migration, tolerance, borders, difference and other core themes of Living Together, the group gather to look at new methodologies and ways of working.  

Alongside the artists' workshop, Gayle Chong Kwan and Monica de Miranda also lead a one-day intensive workshop for Georgian secondary school teachers.  The workshop incorporated methodologies from creative mapping to integrating art into the curriculum as well as the process of working with artists in the classroom.  Teachers also used the What do you feel?  emotional learning cards as a basic tool for developing classroom art projects with which the artists provided feedback for future development.

Gayle Chong-Kwan and Monica de Miranda speak about the workshop:

It has been a powerful reminder for me of the possibilities, complexities and necessity of creating opportunities for artists from different countries, cultures, and practices to work together. By interrogating where we come from, how we communicate and understand each other, we can remind ourselves of the importance of re-mapping ourselves and finding ways, beyond territories and borders, to communicate and work together.

Working with artists from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan during an intense week of experimentation, collaboration, and dialogue, we explored our different perspectives, new processes and possibilities of how 'living together' and working creatively together can become both an imaginative and real possibility.

We worked with art, geography, music, and history teachers from Georgia on an inspiring and focused day to explore, experience and share our own collaborative and participatory work and projects developed in various education settings.  The teachers were incredibly generous in sharing their respective experiences and contexts, the relatively different role of art education in Georgia, as well as exploring how to work across disciplines and develop lesson plans and projects with each other.

It has been a valuable and rewarding opportunity for me to present, share and discuss my work and methodologies in relation to mapping, in a new context, and to see them and myself from new perspectives and approaches. It has been invaluable in widening and deepening my understanding of the artists with whom we have worked, and the contexts and realities which they face.