5 minute read
ReVERBeration: a collaborative, international, sound sculpture project, Greg Morgan
Greg Morgan on a creative initiative that has brought 12 schools together
My involvement with the International Baccalaureate as a Senior Examiner, and with Visual Arts curriculum design, has brought me into contact with an array of teachers, examiners and academics from around the world. As a consequence, I began to consider ways in which staff and students from my school, St George’s British International School (SGBIS) in Rome, might collaborate creatively with some of these remarkable people. Following initial discussions with my Head of School and with the Heads of Art and English at Wellington College UK, I began to formulate an idea for a new international initiative entitled ReVERBeration.
ReVERBeration is a collaborative, sound sculpture based, creative project. Twelve international schools have participated in the initiative. They are spread across China, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Malta, Greece, Norway, Switzerland and the UK. Key fields and elements explored by participating schools have included Visual Art, Dance, Music, Performance, Science, Sport, Creative Writing, Virtual Reality and Poetry. Some participating centres developed cross-curricular projects involving several subject areas and year groups. In other cases, just a single student within a school participated. Whilst the project is centred on sound sculptures as vehicles for communication, conventional visual arts experience and expertise were not required. To enable the various centres within our network to share their ideas and ongoing work, Anton Hazewinkel at The High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University in China set up this blog-based hub: https:// reverberation.ib-art.space/
In May 2019 we transported ReVERBeration to St Paul’s church in Rome. The installation included a rhizomatic web of dozens of biomorphic sculptures, created by our Year 9 (8th Grade) students. Concealed within its tendrils were small speakers which played loops of reverberating audio that they had created in their Music lessons. This element of the main project was awarded the 2019 COBIS International Art Prize for group entries.
Adjacent to this floor-based formation, Year 12 (11th Grade) students assembled a room-sized, metal structure. Sculptures created by our IB Visual Artists were hung from and within this framework. The enclosing walls were made from huge, multi-layered, collaborative drawings created by other IB students as part of their IB Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) programme. The drawings incorporated slots and windows that were strung with handmade ceramic bells. The audience were encouraged to interact with these as they moved through the environment. A further concealed speaker relayed echoing recordings made by Italian language students of a range of vernacular interjections.
The project has been documented in Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. It has also received fantastic feedback and endorsements from a number of international educationalists and academics including Professor Stephen Heppell.
Valentina Vinciaelli is an IB DP1 Visual Artist at St George’s. Here she explains her experiences of the project: “Reverberation is the persistence of a wave after it has been released. It is the echo after the sound has been produced. Having my sculpture being part of such grandness was a challenging yet enlightening experience. For the first time, not only did I think about the individuality of the message it carried but also about how this could be valued internationally. I was inspired by the organic shapes of a human uterus: mother of all life. Withies (thin willow sticks), chicken wire, tissue paper, and grey cardboard appeared to me as appropriate calls to earthly characteristics, and with those I, therefore, built a cylindrical tree-like structure representing the fallopian tube, which in turn holds a spherical component serving as the ovary. The ‘Tree of Life’, as one of my peers described it, was generated gradually and kept flourishing day by day, ricocheting off my hands and into the world where it still blossoms as if it were always spring. Reverberation is the truth magnified through space and time. It is our stories buoyed by the tide of art …”
Valentina’s classmate at SGBIS, Sophie Besselaar, described the project thus: “Everything about this project reverberated. For the design of our sculptures, we took images and contorted and distorted them until they created something new. We bounced ideas back and forth across the classroom to help each other out and give each other inspiration, and even on the final day of the exhibition, you could see how well the artworks reflected the surrounding architecture. My sculpture was inspired by a sensory neurone, a cell that carries information from the outside world to your brain, as it represents this constant process of action and reaction, stimulus and response. This idea wasn’t there immediately; in fact, it was a fellow student who told me my initial plans looked like some kind of cell who gave me the idea. That was one of the things that made this project so creatively wild; we were in a room with twelve other students who were all making sculptures as big and crazy as they could, ranging from gigantic trumpets to modroc seahorses. To not have felt the reverberation in that room would’ve been an impressive feat.”
IB Visual Artists from The Moraitis School in Athens travelled as far as CERN in Switzerland as part of their research for the project. They also worked extensively with younger students for their school community. Eleni Gkotzaridi, an IB DP1 student, explained: “Working with the children from our nursery was exciting, because never before had I used someone else’s voice in my art. It was very interesting to derive my own ideas through the conversations held by them.”
IB Visual Arts students at The High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University focused on experimentation and divergence. As Youyou Luo explains: “You will never know the result from the beginning; you have to try it step by step and satisfied at the end. Art works are more attractive with both visual and auditory. It’s not enough with only visual presentation. The expression of projects should be stronger, stronger, and stronger!”
The project will continue to evolve in the future. In the autumn term my new IB Visual Arts cohort are creating wearable sculptures that develop the motifs of local and global interaction and communication further. We would be delighted to welcome new schools into the ReVERBeration network!
