MARIA NYMFIADI

worldblend 2016

participatory art project

collaboration with the curator Gelly Grindaki

 

worldblend project is about the 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 with 130 different languages spoken.

The visitors to the gallery were invited to share their favourite excerpt of a library book by writing it, in their own native language, on paper that was covering the gallery walls. At the same time we asked from people through a facebook page to contribute by handwriting on a paper a part of a favourite text in their own language and sent us a photo of the text. The printed photos 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 and we organised a visit from a Brent school, Sudbury Primary School students that wanted to participate in the project.

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It was a true worldblend experience, we managed to recognize about 40 languages: Arabic, Albanian, Armenian, Basque, Bayerish (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

As the Willesden Green library administration reported, there were about 5.000 people entering the gallery space, many people participated more than once and some came just to see the exhibition and discuss with us.

In the end of the exhibition the written papers were collected and are going to be used for the making of handbound artist books.

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