Amen.

Photo by dad.

Just to keep things flowing a bit, a small announcement: I graduated from art school a couple days ago with the opening of the exhibition Afgang 10 at the Aarhus Art Building, shown above. The work on show consists of the last two months’ material from Spain and around. It’s not much, at most a preliminary storyboard intending to connect themes and stories, but if you’re in town (or country), feel free to drop by for some cultural enrichment before June 13. There are five other graduating artists on the show, and it’s very odd altogether, but I think in a good way.

Thanks to family and friends who came for the opening from near and far away – it meant a lot to me. That’s my dear brother right there in the front. Can you tell?

Voces de Cambio participants, 2009 (the whole bunch this time)

It should be pretty obvious from my last post that I’ve been away from blogging for a good while, and long overdue that I write. I’m particularly sorry to have neglected to write about Voces de Cambio while the fourth session was still going on, partly because it’s something that I’ve put a lot of time and good effort into during the past months, but mostly because it’s a great organization that deserves much, much more credit and attention. If you want to learn more about Voces, don’t hesitate to write me (or them), visit their website, and if you’d like to support the program, it’s quite easy to make a donation to Voces de Cambio from there. Recently we put them on Facebook and Twitter as well, just in case .. following them on Twitter won’t flood your inbox right away, but we might have participants twittering about their experiences in future sessions. Vamos a ver ..

Above are all of the girls from this year’s session, the fourth so far. Pictured from above, left side are: Sara, Evelyn, Ana, Angie, Laura, Janeth, Felisa, and Nancy. Below: Marta, Darinca, Mariela, and Gladys. A click on the image will open the individual portraits I took of the girls.

Voces de Cambio participants, 2009 (Fourth Session)

Since early July I’ve been working with Voces de Cambio, a small non-profit in Xela run by some great people, and only my general lack of time to blog has kept it out of here; it deserves much more honorable mention than I’ve been able to give it. Voces de Cambio is an after-school program for teenage girls which provide free classes in photography and writing, as well as conversations centered around women’s rights, the role of women in Guatemala, machismo and other issues of gender inequity, and which promotes participation, self-confidence and creative growth. I originally took over from Lucas when he left Guatemala, and now that the fourth session is over, I’ve also left Guatemala. However, it’s an amazing program really, and as it’s close to our hearts we’re both continuing to work with Voces from afar. During the fourth session I’ve been running the photography bit of the program, with the indispensable help of Brenda, a graduate of the program’s first session who now works as an assistant in facilitating the new sessions. With only two days left of the exhibition at Alianza Francesa in Xela, a mention is all but overdue, but I’ll put up my images from the opening as soon as I get myself sorted here. In the meanwhile, all of the final images are now up at our Flickr gallery.

As you can see there’s some great work up there. I’ve really enjoyed working with and getting to know the participants, but also the quality of so many of the photographs has totally humbled me. I should add that most of the girls have never photographed at all before, and they’ve received a very minimum of tutoring – mostly a camera crash course and an idea to go with it. While there’s room for some personal favorites among them, more than a few of the girls have produced amazing work, and it’s been a pleasure as well as an honour to have worked with them. If you happen to be in Xela before Sep. 8th, the exhibition is still on, so I’d say get your butt down to Alianza Francesa.

¡Hasta la próxima!

more below.

My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (…)
Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

(…) Kids will take a chance. They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way, we stigmatize mistakes, and we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is, that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities. (…) We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, – or rather, we get educated out of it.

The truth of what happens is, when children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. (…) So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. (…)
The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not. Because what they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.

TED.com > Talks > Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?