MARIA NYMFIADI

participatory art project

collaboration with the curator Gelly Gryntaki

 

worldblend project is about language diversity and the role of local libraries in multicultural societies.

The project took place in the gallery space at the Willesden Green Library in the London Borough of Brent, which is the second most ethnically diverse borough in the country, with 130 different languages spoken.

Visitors to the gallery were invited to share their favourite excerpt of a library book by writing it on paper covering the gallery walls in their native language. At the same time, we asked people through a Facebook page to contribute by handwriting a part of a favourite text in their language and sending us a photo of the text. The printed images were also exhibited.

During the exhibition, we facilitated two workshops on Reading Together: Introduction to the Therapeutic Aspects of Shared Reading conducted by Christiana Mygdali. We also organised a visit from Sudbury Primary School students who wanted to participate in the project.

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It was an actual world blend experience; we managed to recognise about 40 languages: Arabic, Albanian, Armenian, Basque, Bayerische (Bavarian language), Castilian Spanish, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Filipino, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Ibo, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Odia, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Somali, Turkish, Urdu, Welsh, Languages from Eritrea, Nubia, Uganda and a lot of prewriting scribbles from our little participants.

The Willesden Green Library administration reported that about 5,000 people entered the gallery space. Many participated more than once, and some came to see and discuss the exhibition with us.

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Willesden Green Library 12/03/16-20/04/16 London