Guernica Remakings: Ghana and South Africa

Guernica Remakings - Ghana and South Africa, attends directly to the scope of the highlight notice by developing "understanding [of] how the creative economy can develop sustainably, safely, and ethically in fragile or conflict-affected contexts". It furthers understandings of the role art plays in sustainable community development, across generations in disadvantaged community settings in sub-Saharan Africa.

This project has an urban focus in Ghana, with the Labadi neighbourhood in the capital Accra taking centre stage and attends to a rural area in South Africa, in the village of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape. With a specific focus on addressing SDG 3 - Good health and Well-being, SDG 4 Quality Education and SDG 5 Gender Equality, this project identifies good supportive art making practices, with a focus on collective co-creation, emerging from artists in Ghana, their children and families living in the immediate proximity and artists in South Africa and their children from the artist community.

This project provides a unique opportunity for knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer dialogues on the creative economy within the sub-Saharan contexts of urban Ghana and rural South Africa.

The two locations of Hamburg in South Africa, and Labadi in Ghana are the focus of this project because they are the home of two very established and distinct art practices and projects. In Hamburg, the Keiskamma Art Project running since 2001 employs over 100 women. The Keiskamma Art Project is known for its large-scale textile artworks, which are internationally exhibited, they work with a personal and local iconography drawing upon Xhosa traditions.

In Labadi, a suburb of Accra, Ghana, Serge Attukwei Clottey's studio and the adjoined 100 strong GoLokal collective are located. Clottey's globally exhibited plastic tapestries are created in his studio. The plastic comes from containers shipped from the west, filled with cooking oil and are re-used by many in Ghana to store water, this is having a negative impact upon the population's health. The tapestries spotlight water poverty in Ghana and the issue of plastic waste.

Guernica Remakings, Ghana and South Africa builds upon knowledge exchange and pathways to impact already undertaken. Specifically, this project has been inspired by the experience of working with Savina Tarsitano of Kids Guernica in April 2019 in Mauritius as part of a funding award. The practices and processes utilised in the Kids Guernica workshop aligns effectively with the 2021 UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development's definition of successful education.

For the workshop itself asks the children to think about their worlds critically and reflectively, and then to creatively express what is important to them, what gives them hope, what symbolises peace and happiness, expressing an optimistic future. This is a collaborative endeavour, which engages them in a process of collectively thinking about their culture, their environment, their friends, and family.

They have to map their collective vision on to a large-scale canvas. Each Kids Guernica relates directly to the location of creation, fosters critical thinking, artistic collaboration, discussion on art and social change and aids in the democratisation of the arts and culture of that locality (UNESCO, 2021). During the school holidays in 2022 primary school-age children (6-12-years), along with their parents who work at the art projects and/or live in the immediate proximity to the art projects in South Africa and Ghana, will be invited to participate in the Kids Guernica workshop.

Through this process knowledge and understanding will be co-produced on the role of the art projects in the lives of the children and the parents to better learn about the impact of the creative economy at a local level. This will be achieved through conversation and semi-structured interviews over the course of the workshop and incorporated into documentary videos.