On 3 May 2023, young people aged 9-16 from East Iceland took part in a creative storytelling workshop using found objects, performance, and photography under the guidance of photographer Jessica Auer, actress-puppeteer Tess Rivarola, and The Arctic Creatures, a collaborative group of three artists – visual artist Hrafnkel Sigurðsson, filmmaker and director Óskar Jónasson and actor/ director Stefán Jónsson.
This workshop was developed alongside the opening of Skaftfell’s summer exhibition The Arctic Creatures Revisited. Their work combines the use of found objects — natural and manmade — collected on remote shorelines of Iceland. Creating stage settings in the wilderness using themselves as actors, the artists create visual stories based on mythology, folklore, art, literature, and theatre. Their stories also touch on the pressing concerns relating to environmental conservation, and the issue of ocean plastics pollution in particular.
Over the course of a few hours, students worked with Fujifilm Instax cameras as opposed to phone cameras to encourage exploration of a different medium, one with which students could see their results immediately and make adjustments in real time.
This workshop was devised by Skaftfell, in association with BRAS, Múlaþing, and Ströndin Studio and will form part of NAARCA’s pedagogy toolkit that will be published and publicly available from Spring 2024.
Images courtesy of Skaftfell Art Center and with consent of the participants.