“I think that from this project will emerge some new collaborations inside the community. Some people’s gifts will be made visible and shared. Also some new connections and friendships. The project will bring some joy, interaction and surprises. For me I think it will bring the opportunity to connect people and to offer a safe space for expression. Also the opportunity to observe more the people and how they wish to share their gifts.”
Livia Mateiaş is an artist who also organises community workshops where people can create or experience art. She joined CA to develop her abilities in working with the community and discover new ways and ideas to engage in social actions.
Through CA, she shifted her approach from sharing her own knowledge to creating space for others to bring their talents to the community. She created a series of creative workshops for the public, each one led by a different volunteer.
Livia is a visual artist and the co-founder of the art and design studio artouching and the platform DIGITAL:CANVAS\. She holds creative workshops for different groups (adults, young people, children, senior citizens, and others) in public spaces, parks, art galleries and unconventional spaces such as a Buddhist monastery or a refugee centre. Through her workshops, she seeks to create a safe and relaxing space where people can get to know one another, interact, have fun and bring to light their skills and talents. I want to inspire people to find their talents and maximise their potential, to do what they love and feel good about it.
Timișoara is a city of 250,000 in western Romania. Livia has led a number of creative projects in different parts of the city. One particularly memorable project, called Fairytale Bridge, took place in a poorer part of Timisoara, where a large percentage of Roma live. Livia engaged more than 200 people in learning to knit and knitting colourful bands that altogether measured 350 metres in length. They placed the knitted bands on a bridge and invited people to leave Christmas gifts for children on the decorated bridge.
For CA, Livia originally sought to hold creative workshops with orphans at the Rudolf Walther Center in Timișoara, a group she had worked with before. However, discussions in CA led her to broaden her focus to the whole community and creating opportunities for different people to interact. She decided to hold a series of workshops in Uzinei Park, near the Fairytale Bridge where she had created the knitting project, because no community event had ever been held there before.
Livia asked her friend Adina, a professional basketball player and coach, to help organise the workshops and reach some sports groups in Timișoara that Livia had not interacted with before. Livia also engaged her husband, fellow artist Marius Jurca, with whom she often collaborates on art and community projects.
Her plan was to hold a series of five creative workshops, building on her previous projects. But this time she decided to do something new and different: instead of sharing her own skills, she would invite people from the community to share their talents with others. At the beginning I was thinking of being the mentor in some workshops and now I will ask people from the community, who wish to share something, to be the mentors. The challenge will be to find the best mentors for the community, to make people courageous enough to share their skills and gifts. Before the workshop in September these mentors were not in my plan, but now I think that involving other people to host the workshops is very good. People will be empowered to create themselves some workshops in their community. We will offer the context for them to show their skills and gifts.
Excited about the new direction of her project, Livia kicked off the initiative on 1 March, considered the first day of spring in Romania. On this day people offer women a small symbol of spring called a Mărțișor, which is typically made of red and white strings. Livia and friends created over 100 traditional Mărțișor from upcycled plastic bottles and shared them with people in the park.
As they handed out the Mărțișor, they began speaking with people. They asked them what they would like to see in the park and if they have something to share with the community by posing 3 questions:
Livia and her team spoke with about 90 different people, some of whom said they would like to be part of the workshop series and contribute with some possible workshop ideas.
In the following weeks, Livia spread the word about the workshop mentoring opportunity. She contacted participants of some of her previous projects and reached out through a local hair salon and a pizza restaurant in the neighbourhood.
She immediately got responses from a number of people offering to lead workshops. She assembled the cast of mentors so that there would be a variety of workshop topics appealing to many different interests and people.
She held a total of five workshops from early May through late June 2024. The first workshop was a yoga class, led by a young woman named Iulia who had just become a yoga instructor and was eager (but nervous) about teaching her first class. Her yoga workshop went well and afterwards the participants asked Iulia to create a Whatsapp group for future yoga sessions in the park. In the following weeks, Livia and her mentors organised workshops on origami, modelling in clay, a community picnic with plaster figurine painting and pizza tasting from the local pizza restaurant, storytelling and water games.
Livia estimates that about 250 people took part in the workshops altogether. The people who participated in the events were very diverse, from small children to young people to adults and senior citizens.
In addition to bringing together people to try out creative activities and meet, Livia sees that the workshop series brought about some changes in the community:
Livia is particularly pleased that people stepped forward to share their assets with the community: The main idea of the project was to empower some people to take action in the community and do something using their assets. There were five mentors of the workshops who had their first encounter with the public as a mentor. Three of the five have already started to make some independent workshops after the events. So from this perspective I could say that the event was a success.
Livia learned that it doesn’t take much to create nice things for the community if there is passion and good people around. She also noted how much easier these efforts are when people collaborate, and that a little bit of inspiration and nice examples can show that things can be done and can empower people to take action.
Livia shifted her focus from sharing her own knowledge to empowering people to share their knowledge. I started engaging and empowering the community more with the focus on their talents. Looking at the assets of the community was something which really inspired me and made an impact on my approach.
She explained how this has changed her own role: My role now is to find talents in the community and offer them a safe space for sharing their skills. It is focused on communicating with people and offering the framework for bringing people together and making things happen. In the yoga workshop the community is already self-sustained, they have a Whatsapp group on which Iulia, the instructor announces…new yoga classes.
Livia was surprised to see that her approach also influenced others. She engaged the owner of the pizza shop in the community picnic, who offered free pizza to the public and then changed his marketing approach: I think our work with the community in the park influenced his view in some way…after the picnic they started offering blankets and beanbags to their clients – for having a nice moment of eating pizza in a relaxed manner in the park.
After the workshop series concluded, Livia received funding from the municipality for another project, called Fluid 2.0, which took place in summer and fall 2024. Adina and Marius were part of Livia’s team again, this time creating digital artwork based on the data generated by kids’ interaction on the basketball court. Through the same project, Livia and her team also engaged with people in the park, gave them pencils and invited them to draw, and to go on a walking tour to discover a digital art exhibition. This was inspired by the CA experience. Having a trigger for people and showing them something new. People who walk in that park have probably never been to a digital art exhibition before. It is this community approach: starting with a 1:1 interaction with people and trying to understand them and then bringing them into something that might be useful and inspiring for them.
Watch a video about Livia’s project here.
