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Description
Project MORE LIGHT! aims to reveal the high potential of arts and culture at improving mental health and well-being of youth. The project will take place in the Eduards Veidenbaums memorial museum Kalāči. By remembering and discovering the poet, included in school curriculum, as a young person with a troubled inner world, youth of nowadays will be able to know better themselves, their peers and learn social-emotional skills.An interactive museum exhibition, 4 contemporary art works, a drama workshop will be created during the project in a close collaboration between Latvian and Norwegian cultural, art and health professionals, and groups of young people from Cēsis district. The results of the project will be accessible for school youth from all Latvia with the support of the Latvian School Bag (Latvijas skolas soma) programme during the project and in the following years.The project will not only improve the accessibility of professional contemporary art and culture for Latvian youth, especially in Cēsis district, but will also widen the understanding of the role that arts and culture can play in our lives. Audience development activities will reach the target audience as well as professionals from education and cultural sectors who are directly involved in providing and designing encounters with arts and culture for youth.
Summary of project results
The project MORE LIGHT!, firstly, was needed for the local youth of Cēsis municipality; it offered close and interactive encounters with contemporary culture and arts to this target group which usually is not available to them. Secondly, possibilities for exploring one’s mental health and discuss issues related to it through arts and cultural heritage wasn’t available to the adolescents of the municipality either. And thirdly, the project was very necessary to the museum; it gave a totally new perspective to its own collection and a fresh restart in its activities.
A new permanent exhibition and educational programmes on mental health related to the exhibition were created during the project. Next to it, during the summers of 2022 and 2023, the Museum hosted Sansusī Wellbeing Residences, where Latvian and Norwegian artists along with young people created works of art – drawings, paintings, installations, performances, audio records, poetry, posters.
As mentioned above, these activities were mainly important for the end beneficiaries of the project – adolescents – both as a valuable, eye-opening culture and art experience and as a unique opportunity to improve their mental health literacy though this experience. Both aspects – improved culture and arts accessibility and the focus on the mental health of the programme – was a new experience for the project audience and made a significant difference compared to their former experiences in these fields. The permanent exhibition and related educational programmes will available to Latvian school groups and individual visitors, so the positive effects of the project will continue in the following years.
An important side effect of the project is that it has set a high standard bar among the Latvian museums when it comes to contemporary interpretation of heritage and creation of new museum projects based on that. The exhibition has received the Lavian Museum Association award 2023 and has attracted a lot of professional attention from the museum and heritage professionals. It has been presented in several national and also international conferences as a bright case study of bringing heritage closer to its audiences in a contemporary, relevant way.
Summary of bilateral results
Cooperation with the Norwegian drama expert Morten Bruun contributed significantly to the development of the educational programme linked to the exhibition. Morten trained the involved museum workers as well as local teachers and educators in using drama methods at their work with youth and participated in the development and testing of the Eduards Veidenbaums museum educational programmes in the project.Consequently, not only the educational programmes that will be run in long-term at the museum, were created, but also a wider spread of knowledge was made possible. Teachers and educators who participated in the training are now able to use drama methods at their work independently from the project.There have been conversations regarding possible collaboration between school teachers and Morten Bruun in a similar manner as the new Latvian school curricula includes drama lessons and Latvian teachers are rather poorly prepared in this field. Another EEA grants programme might be beneficial for this eventual, new collaboration.