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The Young Arctic Creatures Workshop to be part of the NAARCA pedagogy toolkit

Skaftfell Art Center’s educational program The Young Arctic Creatures Workshop will be part of the pedagogy toolkit that will be published and made publicly available in Spring, 2024, by NAARCA, the Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action.

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 and mentorship of The Arctic Creatures (a collaborative group of three artists – visual artist Hrafnkel Sigurðsson, filmmaker and director Óskar Jónasson and actor and director Stefán Jónsson), as well as photographer Jessica Auer, and actress-puppeteer Tess Rivarola.

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 sponsored by the local municipality, Múlaþing, and developed by Skaftfell Art Center, in association with BRAS, Múlaþing, and Ströndin Studio.

See other images by the participating students here.