Cara a Cara || Face to Face

Now that I have the art work photographed – and scanned where necessary, thanks to Dan having an A3 printer hiding at home, we need to think about what needs printing up front, how to set up possibilities of people buying prints, and at what cost. However as it is now so near xmas I am diverting my time to look at the building a website for the project, work out how to incorporate an online shop and an up-to-the-minute display of the bidding when that gets going. All this I need to learn how to do … or delegate to someone if anyone has the skill and wants to help :-)

Yes, getting all the marketing sorted out this side of xmas so that we can easily start rolling it out to all our mailing lists, get you all involved and hopefully participating in some way, is important now. I have a domain name www.cara-a-cara.org.uk but I’m guessing it might be a week or more till it is populated with meaningful info. But please do let me know what you think – I’ve tried to use the colours of the Bolivian flag to brand it. After I’ve got the website sorted I’ll need to get on and sort out mailing lists, invites etc… Mailchimp is another tool I really wish I already knew how to use, I’m hoping one of the other artists have some experience with it :-/

All in all I’m pretty full on with this project right now, but it comes at a price, what with this; the “ALAS Residency” exhibition; the “Seeing In The Dark” exhibition that followed that and trying to pull together MA applications for next year … I’m getting very little time in the studio to create new work :-(

We sent over some questions for the children, hoping to find out a little more about them. As the children don’t all turn up every week, it took quite some time to collect and collate answers. We asked:

Q1:Name

Q2:Age

Q3:Favourite Colour

Q4:Favourite Sport

Q5:What do you want to do when you grow up?

Q6:If you were president for the day, what one thing would you do?

There were some insightful answers, especially for the last two questions, such as

A5:

Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Mechanical engineer, Architect

A6:

I’d make the schools better and provide a good school breakfast

Close all the bars (her father’s a serious alcoholic) and help the poor with grants

Make schools bigger

Give children pencils and paper to learn better

Clean up the towns

They may be on the other side of the world, they may be minors, and they may be poor, but they are not without ambition or awareness of their surroundings. I learnt quite recently that two of the adult helpers involved with inti were local children and used to be in the same position as the children they now help, who have somehow beaten the odds to get themselves to university and get an education to be proud of.

I have had some news from the Embassy, there is no forward movement as yet because the Ministry of Culture as I’ve mentioned already, have to approve of their involvement. This project involves children and they need to “to authenticate the children’s identity and confirm whether they have consented that their work and portraits be on display”

I hadn’t envisaged this as being the stumbling block, but in hindsight it makes sense. The one thing about it that I can’t figure out is why they have not requested contact info from us to speed things up? So I have replied and offered to put them in touch with both “inti” and “biblioworks” in the hope of doing so.

I’ve just realised all the images by the artists I put up last time are ‘blue’, maybe an indicator of my mood at the time … I can tell you they are not all blue, honest :-)

Dan who’s work was one of those I posted found a very interesting article I’d like to share with you that was in the Guardian recently: http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/27/child-workers-bolivia-unite This gives you some idea of the situation down in Bolivia, the dilemmas and exploitation facing the children there. In comparison to this article “inti” costs 3bolivianos, which equates to about 30p and the children get 15p for every one sold. This is far better than the return on newspaper selling mentioned in the article. We really want to help; this may be a drop in the ocean but it is something. Please support us. Every little helps. We are trying to give the children “a hand up, not a hand out” as the Big Issue would say.

A couple of weeks ago, before I completely ditched the idea of crowd-funding I had a Skype chat with Philomena (“Inti” contact in Bolivia) and Matt (“Biblioworks” contact in Bolivia) about progress we were making and next steps. I guess from the ambition of the project and the potential it has, I not only got them more excited but I got carried away on how much we could possibly raise for them. While it would be really really great to raise heaps of money I have to be realistic that we do have to actually get the right amount of people in the door who are willing to part with their money.

During the call, Philly and Matt agreed to put together some notes on what they would like to do with monies raised. I thought this would help, if prospective investors had an idea where the money would go and indeed how much things cost in Bolivia compared to here, they will hopefully be more inclined to donate/bid. They also offered to try and put together some video footage that we could use, essentially for the crowd-funding pitch but which could now be used at any/all events we hold. Through the conversation it also became obvious that the intention is to share all monies raised between both organisations. Initially this worried me as everyone involved up until now anticipates raising money for “inti” and now I knew I had to explain that it was for both. How would this go down? Would it change peoples’ interest in participating? I guess I could see it coming, but was ignoring it, hoping it wouldn’t be an issue. Sitting on this realisation for a few days I put it into perspective and accepted that projects do develop, scope changes and often things come about that weren’t planned for. But essentially our aim hasn’t changed. That I can vouch for. We are still raising money to help the street children in Sucre.

Matt talked about his organisation delivering writing and drawing workshops – giving the children the tools to get even more involved with the magazine content – realise the value in education. They both talked about expanding, creating another “inti” community in another nearby town – expansion of the idea, I guess that’s How the Big Issue spread. One community does it successfully and others want it now too. These are two great ideas and I just hope we can go someway to helping out.

After some discussion with one of the artists – Julie, who has agreed to design and compile our book, it made sense to have all the artists work come to me for photographing, save on the to-ing and fro-ing to get size, format etc right … get it the same across the board, and so we could be ‘print-ready’. Initially I thought if the first works were completed by 6^th November and each artist then send me an image we would have plenty time to get pre-xmas printing done. But with everyone mad busy – deadlines slipped (last artist work arrived 16^th Nov not 6^th as hoped), crowd-funding as an option for raising money to facilitate the printing was ruled out etc… the cards have been shelved – for now at least.

The photographing of the work has not been easy, in fact it’s been a real headache to be honest. The lighting in my studio is not the best and trying to photograph drawings – both from the children and the artists – and capture all the pencil marks really well to do them justice has been fraught with numerous false starts: needing my tripod (forgot it in 1^st instance); shooting in raw and needing software to open images, not needed since got new camera over a year ago; needing and struggling to obtain new batteries for my camera remote (to avoid camera shake); ideally thinking a scanner would do a better job, but having difficulty sourcing an A3 scanner; then finding in some cases the scanned image wasn’t any better… have all added to the delays and challenges faced here.

… To the extent that I am now just compiling the last few images to everyone’s satisfaction, and I think when you see them you will agree we have some great and eclectic works to share with you. Obviously it’s worth pointing out at this stage I have (as has all the artists involved) other work/exhibitions/projects on the go, running in tandem with this one, and can’t always give it 100% of my time, juggling everything is proving quite demanding. I’ve been uploading and sharing images via Dropbox so everyone on the project has had a view and can offer feedback, it has its quirks but so far has been a really useful and immediate tool.

At the end of October I finally got a positive reply from Mick at the Bermondsey Space and look forward to working through the detail and securing one of the venues for one of our events. I’m conscious he’s mega busy right now though with the run up to xmas getting ready for all their Crisis clients so hope to catch up early in the New Year. (http://www.crisis.org.uk/pages/support-us.html )

With regards to the Embassy, everything had gone quiet, so I started nudging them with a few emails, to find out the lady I had been dealing with was no longer there and whilst they were still awaiting a reply form their Minister of Culture in Bolivia, I now had to re-send and re-engage with a new contact. I am still hopeful that we can collaborate here and at the very outside at least be able to inform all the Bolivians living in London about out project. I’ll keep you posted.

WoW! That last post was the 3^rd October. Ouch! So much for getting you all up to date with the project and keeping the momentum going… Progress has actually being going full pelt on this side; I just haven’t got around to sharing it with you. Oops…

There have been lots of stumbling blocks, lots of decisions to be made, but also heaps of progress. Most of the children’s work arrived mid October and unpacking and looking at that in the flesh was really exciting. There are some real gems. I’ll share some on here and then hopefully in the not too distant future they will be available for viewing along with the artists work on a project website – details coming soon.

I looked into crowd-funding, even signed up for two events – one with Artquest and one during UAL’s Enterprise week. The 2^nd of these was cancelled but the 1^st was very informative. I think it’s a great thing to do if you want cash for a project (which you can’t accrue from other means) and there is loads of information on the internet now about it. Not to mention here on a-n, see www.a-n.co.uk/p/1002915/ for a great summary.

That said I’ve ruled it out. The main aspect apparent from the seminar is that the more I looked into it the more i saw it would be a full time job for the 2-3 months prior and during your project being live, not to mention ongoing updates to all the donors after the event, to have a successful pitch. It just isn’t tenable on the timeframes we have here. Which put me in a flat spin when I initially realised as I couldn’t see any other way of getting funds for necessary printing I hoped to do – this side of xmas and beyond. As already mentioned I don’t want to ask the artists for any more as they are already donating 1-3 pieces of work.

So some soul search was required. First off I was really nervous this was a crucial aspect of our project – get cards printed in time for xmas, sell and raise awareness in the lead up to major events early in the New Year. But as I calmed down I realised it was just one aspect, one nice to have and not that crucial. I could always put in the money myself and re-coup it after the event – as a loan.

Better probably to get some good images together of all the art work now produced and start putting together a really good marketing strategy – get this blog up-to-date; get a website online; have a facility to pre-order printed material (this way not nearly as much upfront money required) such as cards, limited addition prints, artist books etc; firm up venues and dates and start gathering interested parties to attend the event(s) … so much still to do, probably too much on the list.

What I’ve realised is the whole project is in flux, but madly believe it’s better to have things on the list and rule them out than have not thought about them in the first instance.