Urban ornithology tasks were offered for families and children. Throughout the festival, 8th-12th grade student groups were invited to apply for excursions in the festival led by the art messenger and creative workshop School of Participation.
Workshop director Krista Burāne and artist Ieva Kauliņa invited school-aged children and teenagers (14-18 years old) to apply for a creative workshop as part of the SURVIVAL KIT festival.
"School of Participation" is a new format for a creative workshop, during which children and teenagers will create an artwork - a protest. During the workshop, participants will learn about various artistically interesting forms of activism and think about how to be brave and socially active in situations of injustice.
With the help of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art's art messengers, student groups reflected on a wide range of current issues relevant to young people, and played out situations in small groups that promoted decision-making, political initiatives, and civic engagement.
The goal of the School of Participation's creative workshop was to draw young people's attention to the opportunities and the need to be active at moments when crucial decisions are made for society. In recent years, young people around the world have increasingly expressed a desire to be heard when adults make decisions about the world in which they will spend most of their lives with children and adolescents. However, in Latvia, young people are not aware of their power of speech, and their activity in expressing their opinion is low. Therefore, we offered a workshop for the School of Participation, where we combined various participation theatre and visual activism methods, encouraging young people to think about how to formulate their opinions on problematic issues and express them in a way that draws attention and makes them heard.
During the School of Participation, young people did:
learn about socially active works of art (examples from theatre and visual arts) that inspire the creation of aesthetically interesting examples of activism in situations that threaten democracy;
discuss a socially relevant problem in a situation that threatens democracy;
got to know a creatively interesting form of protest or expression of opinion in-depth;
created their own creatively interesting version of protest when it was not possible to gather in large groups.