itourist?

i’ve been discussing the possibility of turning the study day at MODA into some kind of extended educational event / project involving primary and secondary school kids. it’s still at the planning stage and secondary school involvement will depend on various things coming together…however, jim grant – artist, fellow traveller on the bungalow blitz project, and a school teacher in hackney – is very keen for his primary kids to get involved. we discussed some ideas this evening.

i have to say that whilst i don’t find the idea of working with older kids very daunting i really have no idea where to begin with little ones. anyway, we thought of various ways of approaching it. one thing that came up was the idea of ‘opposites’, or – for the older kids – ‘contradictions’. jim talked about the billboard images – something i tend to avoid for some reason. he suggested that any tension in the photographs might in part be derived from the contradictory relationship that obtains between the environments, and their naming – ‘auschwitz’, ‘sobibor’ etc. and the ways in which these environments, and the people in them, are photographically rendered. both the style of photography and the ways in which the people in the photographs present themselves to the viewer are arguably quite incongruous with the idea of the holocaust. that is with the idea of the event itself, what occured sixty years ago, as opposed perhaps to the ‘holocaust’, which is to say the particular kind of ‘event’ it has since become. indeed it is precisely because the ‘holocaust’, as a contemporary cultural phenomena – spectacle? – is potentially an extremely complex thing, intellectually, experientially, ideologically and politically that it perhaps demands to be represented as such. that is, in ways that deliberately set out to complicate things.

whilst the secondary school kids might specifically touch on some of the more obvious issues that the holocaust inevitably raises – this wont be difficult given the ethnically diverse demographic in enfield and barnet – primary school pupils will probably be encouraged to think about 2 things that do not explicitly reference the holocaust itself. first, the way that we can use images to create a story about ourselves – a basic lesson in theories of representation, sesame street style!/images/medium/missing_file.gif(Missing resource ’ and second, the coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings. which is to say encouraging them to think of ways in which they might represent this in a unified visual environment. how ‘good’ feelings, which become objectified and articulated through ‘good’ images (barbies, remote controlled cars etc.), might enter into a dialogue with ‘bad’ ones (scary places?). incidentally there are several reasons why it probably wouldn’t be appropriate to bang on too much about the holocaust to a group of five year olds. one of which is the fact that many of the kids at jim’s school have come from places where the kinds of things that ocurred in poland sixty years are for them, tragically, not all that unfamiliar. which i guess is a potential minefield (‘)!!) in itself. any thoughts?