Veterans MEMORY BOOK PROJECT November 27, 2007

As part of Red Location Museum’s marketing campaign – it was envisaged that it would be good for the Museum to work on a community project with the immediate surrounding residents which would simultaneously afford the Museum the opportunity to add to its collections.

A pre-selected group of 20 Red Location Residents (age group 50 and upwards) will participate in a project where they would be able to tell their narrative in a three dimensional memory book format.

Such an exercise would equip Red Location Museum with authentic and creative constructions for its permanent collection,encourage the community to tell their stories in visual format and subsequently provide an opportunity for the participants to earn income from the project through promotional materials (booklets and postcards.

The Red Location Museum Memory book Project is intended to create an awareness of the functions of art and how the individual can benefit from its processes. The project was initiated with the aim of providing an introduction to the knowledge and skills, employed by artists using found objects from their environment, in the visual expression of personal and private narratives.

Participants attending the workshops will be provided with practical and visual examples of how the creative
individual, through the medium of art, can participate in a social beneficiary excavation of meaning and memory. The Memory Book Project will thus engender a responsibility for every creative individual to take part in the creation of a flexible, diverse and cohesive social language, the artistic language, with the quintessential
aim of self and social empowerment.

‘Art’ should be everybody’s activity; it should commit itself to a continuous revaluation of human thought,a philosophical recording of concepts, behaviours and belief systems that have, thus far, had any significant influence on the context in which humanity has understood and experienced itself.

This project will focus on the facilitation of a creative environment in which each participant will be assisted in the production of and art work (memory book) using found material sand objects from their environment.

The project will assist in producing a forum for open discussion on various topics related to artistic creativity,ranging from the formal elements of art to subject matter and the creation of personal iconography.

The course requires that as many of the workshops are attended as possible. The success of the project is
dependant on every participant’s self-motivation, self-determination and self-administration: - all of which are prerequisites for self-empowerment.

Each participant will greatly benefit from the awakening of a curiosity and interest in visual images, cultures and cultural artefacts and an inquiry into human behaviour which includes their own. The project also requires complete physical and mental engagement of every individual in the discussions and experimentations of ideas and materials during contact session and also at home.

The project will comprise of nine contact sessions in which a selection of materials and ideas will be employed.

These modules aim at aiding the project participants in developing independent working methods, a
personal style and conceptual thinking.

The topics that will be discussed include:
-The purpose of art and the functions it serves.
-The use of the found object as artistic material.
-The different forms of found materials:
-The found object (ready-made)

Assemblage (assisted ready-made)
Collage
Frottage
Mixed Media.
Formal elements of an artwork.
Materials like:
Glues and pastes
Wax
Plaster of Paris
Alternative and experimental media.

Official Website: http://www.mandelametro.gov.za