13.8.10

community-art

When we will look at the process we are going through these days in twenty years, what we will see is a result. The beauty of a fine process is that it can be seen in a result you enjoy looking at many years later. Our ingredients for this are planning, right team and leadership. From how things look up to now we are on the right track.
This week the two first mosaic pieces were completed. Finishing a high quality 1 square foot tile requires more than a two hour workshop session that we schedule weekly for our groups. Instead of waiting with each tile to be completed by the same person who started it, we moved some of them between groups to add pieces to the partially laid surface. This helped in two fronts: finishing tiles quickly without haste and generating a true sense of communal collaboration. 
We got to a point where one of our biggest challenges is people getting excited and engaged. Usually they just put too little mortar on a tile or lay them so that nothing seems to resemble the intended image. Add genuine interest and you can end up with a bunch of small disasters that no one knows exactly what to do with. This is where leadership comes in handy. We have great leaders helping us in guiding youth in one group. The group of adults seems to understand the need to consult our guidance. Our own leadership is then a matter of balancing between keeping a sense of interest in the work and sensitivity to each person contributing their time and energy to this project.
The demolition of the park that started a short while ago is now transitioning into pockets of construction. By the end of this month we might even see some concrete paths being poured. In those paths we will have recesses to accommodate our tiles. Although there's still a lot of work ahead of us, completion feels very close. 

1 comment:

Ingrid said...

You and Yoko are our good teachers. - Ingrid