The Bees that lives on the Streets of Durban

Bees on the Streets of Durban

One of my past projects I did with the children was for the children to create images that depicted the view they had of themselves as well as society had of them. The children came up with many images some of them being a pig as that particular child wanted to show how the street children can eat anything and live anywhere and not die just like pigs do.
Another image used was that of a bee as that child wanted to show that just like bees street children have a positive and negative side to them, the positive side that society gets to see is that they are still children just like honey is a positive side to bees but the negative side is that they appear to society to be dirty and dangerous just like how a bees sting can also be perceived as negative.

Other images produced include an elephant, a beer bottle, a ball with thorns, a snake, an owl and a butterfly. To progress this project further I decided to take this project to Ekukhoseleni Creactive Centre™ whereby the paintings will be transformed into sculptures. This will be done as a collaborative effort between Umthombo, Caversham Centre and Ekukhoseleni: to view Ekukhoseleni blog follow http://ekukhoseleniarts.blogspot.com/ or Caversham on http://www.cavershamcentre.org/.

The project started as wire sculptures with Ekukhoseleni participants, with Umthombo bringing in 7 children to Ekukhoseleni for seven days to help with building the wire bees. We decided that we were going to start with making bees because the children thought the bee images represented them better. We had a total number of 26 participants including the children and had to divide them into group of two’s, so that two people work on making one bee: in total we had 13 bees being produced. This project worked as our community out reach program by Umthobo, educating the public through participation on the issue of street children and life on the streets.

The idea behind this project being that Ekukhoseleni participants are from Umlazi Township and surrounding areas and that being so they are often exposed to the negative elements of society. Ekukhoseleni attempts though this project to keep them from falling prey to these negative elements that could lead the participants to becoming street children themselves. The objective with this project being for the participants and children to use the sculptures as positive images and to attempt to live life with the same care, creativity and cleanliness that they have put into making the sculptures. In doing so the participants will ultimately not let themselves become “dirty” with the negative aspects that a lifestyle of crime, alcohol abuse, drugs and violence can bring. The wire sculpturing concept stems from the transformation of wire cars that children in the township use to play around with in the streets into a sculpture in such a way to move the participants and children perceptions of the way they see wire not just as a useless object to make a toy out off, they now see wire as something one can use to bring an audience, tell a story, pass a positive and inspiring message to the public.

Since we have created all the bees with wire the next step would be for the project to then move to Umthombo Street Children where Ekukhoseleni participants will be working with street children on covering these sculptures using pulp or paper Mache. The medium used to make this possible will be recycled materials from the various cardboard and tissues that the children come into contact with on a daily basis and disregard as meaningless objects and in such a way move the children from a position of having a negative perspective of the things around them to a positive view of seeing potential in even the simplest of objects. The aim of the workshop is for it not to be just a once off project but rather something the children can use to empower themselves and teach them how to appreciate the materials around them. These sculptures will form part of an exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery during the Street Child Soccer World Cup that will be held next year the 14th to 23rd of March 2010. This exhibition will then be transported to an exhibition abroad in the United Kingdom. During this exhibition the children who were involved in this project will receive an opportunity to work with artists from all over the world in different fields of art such as the performing arts and visual arts.

This will be done to create a platform for the children to educate the public on their stories. These stories will enable the public to move and change their perception on street children from a negative image to a more positive one.

The work is still in progress, watch out for the final product soon…. Thanks to Momentum Arts again for making this project possable.