Over the course of Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning, the Greek organisation Athens Comics Library will facilitate Slow Start Workshops to offer the opportunity to produce personalised, context-specific Take Away Art Packs. These will be gifted directly to the local community of children in the neighbourhood surrounding Islemunda (one of our headquarters) during our ICAF family day on Saturday 1 April.
Each morning twenty participants will have the opportunity to work directly with dr. Lida Tsene and Dina Ntziora, the initiators behind Athens Comics Library to create takeaway arts packs relating to this years’ festival theme “The Sound of Change”. Alongside sharing their Take Away Art Pack methodology, dr. Lida Tsene, researcher and teaching associate at the MA Program Communication and New Journalism at the Open University of Cyprus, will facilitate a talk, introducing participants to the work of Athens Comics Library. She will share her expertise around the value and impact of creative arts in early education for trauma healing and community engagement, as well as the development of psychosocial skills for healing, storytelling and community-based practices.
At the end of each workshop, the Take Away Art Packs will be collected together, in preparation to be gifted and shared with the children of the IJsselmonde neighbourhood during our Saturday family day. Participants of the workshops are encouraged to attend the Saturday afternoon session to join in the facilitation and opening of the Take Away Art Packs directly with the communities they are made for.
About
Athens Comics Library, provides a safe and creative space for local, refugee and migrant children and their caregivers through their broad, participatory cultural programme that includes activities around art, storytelling and sports.
Athens Comics Library’s vision is to showcase the power of comics and storytelling as an educational, healing and community engagement tool that boosts a love for reading, teaches multimodal literacies and promotes self-directed knowledge through the medium of comics. For Athens Comics Library comics teach soft skills such as collaboration, creative problem solving, intercultural understanding, empathy, as well as social skills through gaining a better understanding of our surrounding complex societal environments.
During Covid lockdowns and in order to stay connected with their communities Athens Comics Library started creating a series of creative Take Away Art packs for preschool children, part of their Baytna Hub program. The Take Away Art is a DIY creativity pack that children can enjoy at home together with their caregivers. It stimulates creative storytelling through a do-it-yourself, empowering approach.