During its nearly two years of operation, the Ord och Inga Visor project has brought together hundreds of children, young people and adults in workshops. The project’s third exhibition, consisting of pieces produced in the workshops at Hannunniittu school in the autumn of 2020, is now displayed at Kunsthalle Turku. Workshop instructor Margarita Rosselló Ramón on working with the schoolchildren at Hannunniittu:
“In the pieces, the word and image come together as part of the lives of their creators. Some of the pupils started the work by taking photographs, while others started with the words, selecting the ones that meant something to them. The pupils could select the words based on how they sound or what they signify. The words reveal thoughts of hobbies, favourite foods and dreams, for example. The selected word then led the children to explore various languages and ponder on their impact. The photographs, in turn, studied the school environment, in other words the children’s everyday scenery, through a pinhole camera.”
Started in 2019 as a cooperation between Photographic Centre Peri and the Turku Artists’ Association, the goal of the Ord och Inga Visor / Sano se kuvalla project is to develop natural means of increasing communication between language groups as people from different linguistic backgrounds get together in creative activity.
The project has implemented multilingual photography workshops where the participants learn about digital photography, pinhole cameras and editing images with texts under the instruction of artists and educators. The workshops have taken place at Turku’s Hannunniittu school, Pääskynpesä day care centre and the Parkinmäki residential home, Parainen’s Sarlinska skolan, Paraistenseutu school and the art school Pictura as well as Kaarina’s Hovirinta educational home under the Sateenkaari Koto organisation. Drop-in workshops open to anyone have also been organised at Kunsthalle Turku.
The project is funded by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.
Photo by: Miia Panula
