On Saturday July 18th and Sunday July 19th, from 13:30 till 16:00 in de Maakfabriek, Churchillweg 21, Wageningen
A workshop in which you recheck your values and identity, and create new symbols for yourself. The workshop is a joint collaboration between Tamrat Gezahegne (multimedia artist) and Dienke Groenhout (interdisciplinairy artist).
Tamrat: “I can say I am Ethiopian, it is in my passport and it is an identity that was given to me, but can I truly represent it? I don’t even know what it means to say I am Ethiopian.
So I traveled my country to find out about it, and to find out which values I share with all the nationalities that Ethiopia contains. Each symbol is like a talisman. The script includes traditional and modern habits, food cultures, heritage and social values.”
Dienke: “I traveled the world a lot and I was given many names like foreigner, outsider, stranger. At a certain point I felt that my outside was disconnected from what I felt I was on the inside. People thought that I belonged to some group that I didn’t represent in my own feelings. And I started to research this feeling by making costumes for myself that created a whole new context for me. A possibilty to represent a new identity that I could be and to wonder what I wanted to be.”
The costumes Dienke makes and the symbolic script that Tamrat designed where born from similar research questions: can we try to redesign the values that we find important in life, and ask ourselves ‘what do we (want to) represent in this world?’
Workshop:
Artist talk about Tamrat’s new script named Wehed, which means mixed in harmony.
Artist talk about the “Ferengi” project that Dienke did in Ethiopia.
After the presentation you can design your own symbols and blockprint them on a small flag (or tattoo it on your body). We will create a flagline with our joint values from the group and display it in the new exhibtion window of MakeFactory.