ACDC. Workshops English - LABA Valencia

WORKSHOPS

ECOWAVES

Description

In this workshop, students explored photography and storytelling as tools for engaging with the topic of climate change. Through creative experimentation, they learned how to capture images that spark curiosity, inspire conversation, and surprise their audience—all while using eco-friendly materials.

Goals

Create new images about climate change that speak directly to young people.
Learn how to tell stories through images.
Learn some basic skills of photography.
Give a different perspective from the typical images young people see on social media.
Help students connect emotionally with the topic of climate change, create awareness and promote action.
Encourage students to use their creativity to design artwork or posters that raise awareness about climate change.

Results

This was a participatory activity, adaptable to the materials available, which encouraged students to approach the topic from their unique perspectives. The workshop began with a group discussion to introduce the aims and structure, emphasising that there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ outcomes; each outcome is valuable and comes from an experimental process.

Following the introduction and an open discussion for students to share initial ideas, we covered the basics of photography, including ISO, shutter speed, aperture (F) and framing. Inspirational examples will be shared to help students imagine their own creative approaches.

The workshop concluded with a collaborative review where students analysed their work and received constructive feedback, fostering a positive learning environment.

PERSPECTIVES

Description

This workshop seeks to give a twist to everyday activities, such as taking photos from a cell phone, with an artistic sense and under an environmentally responsible perspective.

95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram every day. Teenagers are used to editing photos on their phones for this purpose, and we want them to use these skills for a different purpose, to create unique and provoking images to create awareness about climate change.

Goals

Give the knowledge to send messages about climate change through art.
Encourage students to capture images that showcase changes in the environment.
Get participants to think creatively and experiment with photography and perspective.
To explore abstract representations of climate change.
Discuss ways art becomes a tool to open new spaces to talk about climate change.

Results

Students explored an environment that is familiar to them, but try to look at it differently, see the details and imagine how they can catch images with their phones that recreate nature through textures and visual illusions. Some examples was be given and shared.

Extra details been given about editing in a phone App (temperature, saturation, contrast…) or students explored and discovered by themselves.

UNFORMATTED WORDS FOR DISPARATE IMAGES

Description

This workshop contributes to getting to know the dimension and character of visual communication about climate change in the media, particularly on the Internet. As knowledge is acquired about the wider social discussion on the subject, students will create their own critical perspective by experimenting with the creation of narratives, through word and image and cinema composition techniques. At the same time as exploring the context of climate change, they will understand how the construction of a discourse depends on strategies of representation.

Goals

Experimental approach to visual/cinema literacy

Thinking critically about “Climate Change” through research on the internet
Assigning meanings to images (idea + personal interpretation)
Evoke ideas through montage by juxtaposing and overlapping images

Stimulating creative thinking and doing

Use of accessible material resources
Interacting in small groups
Raising curiosity about artistic tools and processes
Exploring irregular visual configurations in the creative process

Results

We explored the ability to associate what is apparently disparate, by collecting words and appropriating images by searching about “Climate Change” on the internet.

To create a visual and sound poetic composition, we used a method of deriving phonetic sounds and juxtaposing and superimposing images in the montage of sequences.

The result is irregular visual/sound devices that translate the unformed and disparate mode of creative thought.

AROUND THE CITY, WE STROLL

Description

The way we live, use and see the city/town/village, both individually and collectively, is defined by our daily journeys. Routes that we often walk without thinking, without really living or seeing the place. This workshop proposes slowing down and strolling through the city, defining a mental path in the confrontation of reference images – street names, signs, façades, neon, people, trees and memories, and realising how present climatic emergencies are in our daily lives: a tree that has been cut down, a lawn that has turned into tarmac, a bin overflowing with rubbish, a street overflowing with cars. Or a weed between two parallels, a bird singing on a high-voltage pole, the wind whistling through a solitary tree.

Challenge

The challenge of this workshop is for each student to reflect on the impact of the climate emergency and unsustainable daily habits on their collective lives by mapping the city and identifying their daily routes. Overlaying the mapping of the whole class will graphically result in a new collective map of the city, where intervention zones can be located – in other words, areas that, in a collective effort, can be improved for a lower environmental impact. From here, short collective videos will be produced using moving images, and sounds, which will concretise these mappings and assimilate elements of the climatic emergency of reference for these routes.

Results

The results of the workshop come from the processing of images and sounds, which result in two dimensions of the city – the two-dimensionality of the map and the three-dimensionality of the cinema experienced, which gives it another scale, another dynamic and another look.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. | ACDC – Inclusive climate change education with and through art & design. | Small-scale partnerships in school education. | Project reference: 2022-2-ES01-KA210-SCH-000097507. | Project duration: 1/3/23 – 28/2/25 | Project Card