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Richard Kilpert is an arts educator who has worked on community projects, lectured in printmaking, run the Imagination Lab and worked with the World Design Capital’s education programme. He is currently at the MOCCA Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art.
Found in Translation
In 2019 the MOCAA Centre for Art Education (CFAE) initiated a collaborative project with tertiary students to create exhibits specifically designed to encourage children’s mental and physical interaction with our museum content – especially those on primary school tours and family outings. It was called “And So the Stories Ran Away” (ASSRA) and proved to be an innovative attraction, with parents spending time reading the accompanying stories and larger groups creating their own artworks to take back to their schools. With the advent of lockdown, our curatorial staff has been challenged to develop content which can be accessed both online and in mobile formats, so the CFAE has been translating the original stories into various languages, documenting the exhibition as it exists in situ, and planning for future school visits with a “kiosk” format as pioneered by the Institute of Arts & Knowledge in Accra, Ghana. My presentation will briefly describe the preparatory stages outside the museum, show examples of the working process on site, and outline our digital and mobile versions currently in development. The word “translation” in my title is intended on three levels. Literally it means the translation of the written and recorded stories into the children’s own languages, such as Xhosa or French. On another level it refers to the way this art project has been transformed into a broader educational experience. And on yet another level it refers to the way the project has been extended by taking it online or in pieces into schools and community art centres.