Venice International University V
enice International University is located on the island of San Servolo. Earlier this year the President of VIU, Umberto Vattani, hosted several meetings with Ms Williams and Mr Ryan, to discuss the possibility of developing a number of collaborative projects between St George’s and his own organisation. Amongst his many previous roles, Sig. Vattani has served as Italian Ambassador to Germany, Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and President of the Italian Trade Commission. He is currently engaged in a wide range of international cultural, artistic and economic endeavours beyond his work with VIU. Consequently, we are particularly pleased that he has asked to involve our own school in some of his future projects. To initiate our long term partnership with VIU, we were invited to bring a group of students to visit San Servolo, so as to experience their unique campus. We were also asked to participate in a significant performance work by Chinese artist Qin Feng, that took place in the former Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. Eight members of Y12 were selected for their creativity, curiosity and eloquence. Accompanied by Ms Williams and myself, the students used the journey up to Venice to carry out additional research in preparation for their meetings with Sig. Vattani, his university staff and Qin Feng. La Serenissima greeted us with a torrential downpour. Fortunately, resplendent in wellingtons and waterproofs, we were well prepared for anything that the elements could throw at us, including acqua alta. We filmed and photographed our way across the canali, ponti, campi and calli, until we reached the vaporetto from San Zaccaria to San Servolo. Having settled in to our accommodation at the university, we then set off for our appointment with Sig. Vattani, Qin Feng and the illustrious art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva. Qin Feng’s ink painting performance took place under a replica of Veronese’s ‘Wedding at Cana’, in Andrea Palladio’s refectory of the Basilica di San Giorgio. Accompanied by a solo cellist, the artist scythed his colossal brush across the canvas covered floor. Audience members frequently risked a splattering of inky droplets. Once the show was over we met the artist himself and were extensively photographed by the attending press. The following morning our group met with VIU’s programme coordinator, Cristina di Gioia, who gave us a tour of their facilities. This was followed by a fascinating presentation of the university’s history, aims and their ongoing work with visiting students and professors from around the world. Our students were a credit to St George’s, as they enthusiastically articulated their ideas and questions. We discussed opportunities for many innovative creative and educational collaborations between our two organisations. We set off back into Venice with our heads buzzing with fascinating possibilities. After a session of drawing, photography, critical writing and poetry in Santa Maria della Salute, we had lunch around the Accademia. We then hopped on to the number 2 vaporetto back up the Grand Canal to the railway station. The students spent the return journey to Rome editing a video documenting their trip and generating further ideas for our new partnership.
GM
W
E G N A
EXCH
n 2015 I was contacted by students from The United IExchange World College of Maastricht, to discuss setting up an Art in conjunction with the BP/Tate Gallery initiative. The project subsequently evolved so as to also include The International School of Paris. Prior to the live exchange at SGBIS, we asked students from all schools to devise several collaborative creative activities. The 4-day project began with the visiting students participating in a range of our own IB DP lessons. They subsequently ran a book making workshop with our Year 5 artists. The following day, staff and students from all three schools explored concepts of cultural convergence through collage, drawing and the production of a large scale, permanent mural in the office of our Principal’s PA. On the final day we were given an extended private view of the recently opened ‘Outdoor Festival’. This huge exhibition, held this year in an abandoned military complex, is Rome’s annual showcase of international street art, organised by Drago Labs. The following paragraphs, written by SGBIS IB Visual Artist Giulia Gherardini, are taken from a 7 page article about the project published in World Student Magazine in 2016 GM
y Year Twelve IB Visual Arts class was given the M chance to collaborate with an exchange group from UWC Maastricht and ISP. This interaction was potentially a challenging one; not all of the participants were Art students and, prior to this project, we didn’t know each other. However, in the spirit of the IB and international education, we took this occasion as an opportunity to engage with diverse visual stimuli and characters, thereby opening ourselves up to unfamiliar techniques and approaches regarding Art and creativity.
The core focus of this project was to generate unconventional yet coherent compositions evoking the human face. During our collaborative project, we merged disparate artefacts, contexts, costumes and historical periods. Indeed, this step-by-step process required reflection, resourcefulness and dedication. Initially, we assembled individual collages, choosing from a variety of images; I selected the most peculiar, contrasting features of the source photographs
provided that I found most captivating and thought provoking and, together with my peers, consolidated divergent but equally inventive ideas in response to the idea of cultural convergence. In particular, I explored the surreal association of elements of a WWI gas mask with Native American headwear, whereas another student found visual links between contemporary Halloween make-up and subSaharan African Tribal sculpture. We each created large-scale drawings of our collages. These were then further developed by using emulsion paint and water soluble graphite sticks to define the areas of light and shadow. Once these individual drawings were completed, we collaboratively assembled them into a cohesive overall composition. Thiswas when diplomacy, tact and cooperation started to become particularly meaningful. Our final task was to transfer these drawings onto the walls of an office; simply fitting seventeen students, two teachers and all of our painting and drawing equipment into a confined space was a major challenge, and working simultaneously on a two metre high mural was like playing a game of three-dimensional twister. On the final day of the exchange project we explored the ‘Outdoor Festival’ of international Street Art. The festival’s distinctive notion: bringing a stark, inaccessible military establishment to life through an array of vast mixed media artworks and installations highlights the approach of thinking “outside the box”. The American Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau stated: “It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see”. Analysing this statement in coalescence to the Outdoor Festival, one may consider the ways in which these artworks are perceived by the different individuals participating in our project. Although each of us was exposed to the same art piece, personal and unique responses were evoked by our interpretation of these elements; this freedom of thought and flexibility as regarding the observer’s approach to the pieces is also echoed in the festival’s method regarding the organization and arrangement of the exhibits themselves. We were privileged to wander freely around the huge site, not following a set path but being guided by intuition and sentiment. This established a sense of autonomy and installed an intimate connection regarding each individual’s relationship with the elements observed, defined by our affinity to the pieces, by the power of the emotions they evoked in us and by the imaginative ideas, also concerning potential counter creations. Having spent the previous day creating our own site-specific artwork, we were better prepared to appreciate the intentions and approaches of the artists and curators who had vividly animated these previously bleak environments. This visit formed a perfect conclusion to our initial collaboration and left us all eager to plan further projects with ISP, UWCM as well as with our own peers from St George’s. Watch this space! Giulia Gherardini
B
eech leaves leech summer’s heat, boil themselves brown on the bough. Sugars ferment into unpoetic nouns: anthocyanine; carotenoid; xanthrophyll. Slipped emerald capes reveal flashes of strange orange lingerie over a skeletal frame. Exiled Ovid would applaud this slow metamorphosis each year when, for carmen et error, in Tomis he watched another season fall orating to a room filled with the deaf writing for a salon of the blind waiting for what never comes: recall. Adam Oliver
Ruihong Jaing: Year Eleven Autumn (After Giuseppe Arcimboldo)
Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes here Roberta text about poetry project goes
From The Bow Seat ocean awareness student contest Bianca Pozzi in Year Eight created this amazing image as her entry to the annual ‘From The Bow Seat’ competition. This project was developed in 2011 by a family who were concerned regarding ocean pollution in their local area. Having created their own documentary they became aware of how powerful artwork in its many forms can be, and took this to a global level by offering competition opportunities to young people around the world to create ‘the next generation of ocean caretakers’ VB Relating to the competition theme, I chose to concentrate on Plastic Pollution. My painting depicts the negative effects of plastic on marine life. I show this through the image of the sea-bird’s rib cage filled with plastic waste abandoned by humans on beaches or in the sea. The plastic eventually falls out of the bird’s body and reaches the baby (which I chose to represent as a reflection of the bird). This means that the effects of plastic pollution harm marine life but will be reflected onto the human race if we don’t stop it. Through my painting however, I don’t only want to transmit a negative message but I chose to show that by flipping the page around, the child (representing us humans) has the power to stop pollution reaching it. I believe this can be done and entered the contest to give others the motivation I have.
I first became aware of the plastic pollution issue in oceans walking along a beach in Canada, where I saw a sea-bird who had been killed by a plastic ring. I drew the sun in the style of Native American artwork because of this memory. A man on the beach then told me “You can also help the loons, if you try”. From that trip I was given the nickname “loon” (a type of sea-bird) and I want to try to help our oceans. Bianca Pozzi
The Process Portfolio in IB Visual Arts at St George’s d fiel , r o n ect igatio he j b t su st ny inve l, and pon a s in osity, to fai uild u ents e b s d om ri utc n cu ngnes and ts stu s are . o tive upo a willi review al Ar tivitie tfolio f a e Cr pend tion, ally Visu e ac Por 0% o de gina critic or IB ursiv cess orth 4 ports ima ility to re. F l rec ir Pro t is w It sup isions t ab t failu rucia in the rtefac rade. , dec s tha tha se c nted dia a rall g tions work ol. the cume lti-me s ove nspira e art scho do is mu dent’ the i nd th d the Th ch stu ords behi aroun ea d rec nies ayed an d ago displ GM e n a se you
The Process Portfolio in IB Visual Arts at St George’s
The Process Portfolio in IB Visual Arts at St George’s
The Process Portfolio in IB Visual Arts at St George’s
Year 5 and 6 students from St George’s Nomentana undertook a 3-week poetry and art workshop with Viviana and Isadora from Art and Seek. This project was in collaboration with the Keats Shelley House in Rome. The students and teachers investigated the life and work of Byron, Keats and Shelley. They produced visual artworks and creative writing on diverse themes. The final outcomes will be displayed in the Keats Shelley House after Easter. KK
The Art Expedition for AS and IB Visual Arts Students
TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES HERE TEXT ABOUT TEDX TRANSMEDIA PROJECT GOES
Ruihong Jaing: Year Eleven Seamus Heaney (After Tai-Shan Schierenberg)
Intimations of Mortality L
ife and death mingle inseparably in Human Chain, the twelfth book of poetry by Seamus Heaney. Everywhere plants / Flourish among graves, notes the narrator of A Herbal, and it is the interplay of this intricate, intimate bond that is crucial to understanding his latest work, the first collection from the Nobel Laureate since recuperating from a mild stroke in 2006. Family and friends, places and objects, the natural world and the realms of language and literature all form other links in the chain of the title, just as they connect all Heaney’s work. Nevertheless, his brush with mortality sets the tenor of the volume from its first poem. Had I not been awake treats the sudden brief trauma of the attack metaphorically. It is A wind that rose and whirled until the roof / Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore. A precise attention to etymology is a feature of Heaney’s style and his choice of wind as metaphor is typically careful: our abstract noun ‘inspiration,’ to be filled with ideas or creative energy, derives from Latin sources where it means ‘to breathe into.’ With its swirl of inspirational wind and its liquid pattering of leaves, the line holds more than an echo of the epigrammatic couplet which opens The Haw Lantern: The riverbed, dried-up, half full of leaves. Us, listening to a river in the trees Heaney’s narrator is strangely galvanised by this gust which nearly kills him: it got me up, the whole of me a-patter / Alive and ticking like an electric fence. Stroke blends with the lightning-strike of creativity; a brain-storm that is simultaneously destructive and creative. The collection, like the life, will take root in the borderlands of life and death; will Flourish among graves energised by the electric nature of the thin fence dividing the two states. Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1966. In a career spanning nearly fifty years he has unsurprisingly rubbed shoulders with death on many occasions. Even as early as that first major volume he was writing movingly about bereavement, the poignant and muchanthologized Mid-Term Break exploring the loss of his brother. Likewise 1987’s The Haw Lantern centres on the eight-sonnet sequence Clearances, discretely dedicated in memoriam M.K.H. and remembering his mother. In Human Chain, the experience of the stroke makes the confrontation with mortality even more direct. The second poem to deal with his illness, Chanson d’Aventure, substitutes the comfortable pastoral allegory of Had I not with a harsher, more industrial metaphor. Like a broken-down machine the stroke-paralysed narrator is Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked / In position for the drive to the hospital. We are accustomed to a more agricultural, more ‘human,’ voice in Heaney’s verse and the unexpected shift of register embodied in those four verbs of imprisonment (Strapped, locked) and mechanical movement (wheeled, forklifted) suggest his own sudden dislocation. The primal Heaney voice of field and furrow will slowly re-establish itself, but at the moment of rupture the narrator’s first recourse is not to nature but rather the support of his wife, Marie. They mirror each other: Our postures all the journey still the same, a painterly still-life with the threat of death hung over it. The ambulance ride to an uncertain diagnosis is agonising - no transport / Ever like it – but again it is the brush with death that makes life and language blossom. Playing upon the ambiguity of transport Heaney is able to fuse the literal sense of the ambulance he lies in and the word’s other meanings: the frightening ‘removal from this world to the next’ and the poetic ‘Carry away with the strength of some emotion.’
A poem begun mechanically takes flight from this noun that does double service in both common and abstract forms. Part one of Chanson concludes with a literary reference to one of the richest of English writers, the Metaphysical poet John Donne. But Donne has been present before he is name-checked. The clue again rests in the multiple meanings attached to transport. In its sense of being carried away with great emotion it is synonymous with ‘ecstasy,’ and so we are led to Donne’s poem The Extasie. We see that Heaney has been re-writing Donne’s meditation upon love and the human soul, renewing the poetic chain in line after line: Everything and nothing spoken / And we said nothing all the day; Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast / Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread / Our eyes; Our postures all the journey still the same / All day, the same our postures were. The bell will one day sound for Heaney too, but not yet. The poem ends with him in step // Betwen two shafts, another’s hand on mine. The human chain, rebuilt through love and through the literary tradition, completes itself for a moment, ends touching as life and death connect. The elderly poet remembers his youthful beginnings, and in that moment of rural surety feels the pressure of a hand from the other side of the electric fence. A fatherly hand, still present to help steer the ploughshare through the hinterlands of his lot of years. Literature and language from the ancient world underpin Human Chain as deeply as the masters of the English canon. As Alphabets, in The Haw Lantern reminds us, Heaney’s classical education included column after stratified column / …of Elementa Latina. When, in Album, his grandson rushes him With a snatch raid on his neck Heaney is struck as a parallel embrace…/ Swam up into my very arms. He is thinking of Aeneas, the hero of the Roman poet Vergil’s Aeneid, trying to embrace the ghost of his father Anchises. Heaney’s memory is not just of stories, but, again, of the individual words that compose them. The tender sincerity of the hug leads Heaney to recollect that phantom / Verus, Latin for ‘true,’ in more detail. In a parallel verbal chain of its own the word has survived for two thousand years in our modern quantifier ‘very.’ We use it to call something very good, or very bad, for example. Heaney however, ever the watchful etymologist, uses the word not in its modern adverbial or adjectival senses but in its archaic manifestation, where it holds literally ‘true’ to its root meaning. Holding true is an important notion in Heaney’s work. The Riverbank Field, a poem placed near the centre of Human Chain and arguably one of its central links, sees linguistic echo amplify into direct translation. Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / ‘In a retired vale…’ The words are again from Vergil’s Aeneid, and the elderly Heaney repeats another youthful act, reworking the verse as he was enjoined to often / ‘In my own words’ whilst a student. His re-phrasing explores Vergil’s consoling suggestion that the human chain extends beyond death. That the after-world is only another part of our journey, where the soul… longing to dwell in flesh and blood / Under the dome of the sky awaits rebirth. And again, humanity and language are united in the human chain as the verb translate, like that earlier transport, is made to do double service. It is not just the act of converting words from one language to another, but chimes with its other, original meaning: ‘carried over’; ‘to be removed from one state or place to another.’ The form of most of these poems, the shape of the ‘chain,’ is the tercet. Each three-line verse is usually marshalled into poems or sections of four stanzas. Heaney’s use of these ‘squarings’ has grown in frequency as he has matured. They are rare in the early collections, occurring only once in each of Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark. Where they do appear, as in Rite of Spring, the line seems tentative. The tetrameter feels jerky, the product unfinished compared to the fluent iambic pentameter of Human Chain.
Here the squarings are so common that their utterance is like a heart-beat, cardiac dull / …taken for granted. Through regularity and recurrence poetic form is able to subtly suggest unity, the sense of a single speaking voice that in the early collections is present in tone and manner but not so coherently presented by form. It is appropriate that Heaney has built his twelfth book of poetry from these twelve-line ‘bricks’ which, in his maturity, he seems capable of laying as profligately as his father and grandfather cut the turf in that very first poem, Digging. The poet Colm Toibin, in a sensitive review of Human Chain in The Guardian, called the squarings sonnet(s) without a couplet, that display a refusal to close and conclude. In this sense, the predominant form of the collection marries with the central content. These ‘almost-sonnets’ teeter at the brink, the tipping-point where we might expect the ‘turn’, the sudden delivery to our expectant ears of consummation. And they do not deliver it. The final couplet is always absent, the last link in the chain absented. Where we expect an end, we find the possibility of continuity. We are reminded that it is a poet’s task to raise questions, not answer them. Looking for solutions rests with the reader: in any poem the writer is at one end of the chain; we, the audience, at the other. There is, however, a form of answer to conclude Human Chain. The ordering of the poems in a volume is always significant, and in selecting A Kite for Aibhin as the last poem Heaney makes an optimistic statement. The poem is dedicated to his latest granddaughter, and this very literary kite also features in an earlier poem for his two sons. The suggestion is of continuity, of family: the genetic incarnation of the human chain, travelling into the unknown future: A white wing beating high against the breeze.
Adam Oliver Originally published in emagazine September 2012
&
Art Gallery Visits Creative Writing
Scorrevaselungo il nz
fium e , lung o fi u e. Scorreva utti Scorre lli e cam t t u va br ran ca m b i a di t
a un d o n a i i l l m g e o v s n i r do, m o ent bie re s tti do i ris vo n pec ben chiaro ofo r c p h iava, va l proprio tutti be nitosa, ne
ndo lu utti do l’attenzione d c n che da grigio si fece rosa, om go i Scorrev fino alpleta l fiume ne ma o m a i a nte il tem aranc lun rrone, pe c o a t t t o e r p i s a n t n e tenti div ga co , at ide il f r poi sfociare nell’ rgia ton ndo iume e iti d la sua en i m con a a i g a f fine Sco ronte a ta os ro n i a m u l n t a e stre rre m a m v a u d i Qu i luce rislunga il fal buio plendente asi g iunti alla fine ò... lun go il n Ê e r f a i ume si s ave .. di
un f ndo lasciato dietro ovo. iume tutto nu
no che stan e it n u ccia e le bra i h c n ia b taloni a mia pato sull on i pan c m , ta o s z z to e n gli acciare. sorriso fi ello in m uardavo r u g n b q u b e a tr n o n o a n e c d o blico suno mia iare m i, io s n c’è nes intrattenere il pub lte notti a voltegg come sarebbe la ...eccom o n a m o nd ad mo are abbraccia ra sarò obbligato volta, ho passato fantastic a o li g e v e s a ter s a da po tt Anche sta rata. Non è la prim Tutte le notti resto ia parte. e n io r a ri. pe nza na m am anima dis enti degli spettato ruolo, all o...non u tto ad esibirmi se r io e b m li l a ta r e iffe idir artis costre occhi ind over sempre ubb cato? Un tta la vita. Sono o v v a d n a a edico? U ogni anno, per tu o legato n vita senz m o s n u è h e c per sser ese, stiti Potevo e ppare via uello che ho: ve ra, ogni m a e c s s i n o g s o s re on po tutto q comanda e basta! uesto è attino. N r q u b E n i. ir r u me. d o o r u no un no ione molt e mai pote balli o m sono solo ig r m o io p : m a e o la n n d u U n fo form un on ho armi. Perchè in E’ una semplice cappare corpo...n er ascolt s p n li u g ta , r s o fa ll te r a ili. o pe eno la ione, la da b fili invisib mo di tutt lza nemm lo un’illus i, una sa ia a o ll c s e c o p è n fa p u a a s e c m s i può E ne orre, chera eleganti, silenzio. cui non s una mas ro ieri. Il tempo sc a in , d , e o m la d o n tu p a s p a tra un co n l’alt Sto grid come un ossiamo omani co o d d n ile. e In o i . r s te ie e n n m impossib ne..ed io sono oa gi co elega n e g r o m to r o in e d p n ti onfo pare tro è partie sorriso. C empre fermo e le balletto te a, che non ci ap to s e u q ès e fals oltre a re. ibili, il binario ’immagin ue cosa n q u n ne di vive in a fili invis lu io i a s ti s u a is iu Q g h m . le c e a ir in ll o fugg fond tutti r llito ne i siate in anima. do siamo ia! Ho fa o r n v a l’ fo e e h in r c ia n a M racc stra he a dubbio c ere appieno la vo ui ad abb l e n , te a ancora q rim erv ear 7 e mi oss ere liberi e di esp nginoli, y A voi ch E s s a e s i o d R e da vec o scritto auguro in Monolog
cross curricular tripsa nad projects at KS3