Workshop “Market – the belly of the city” was realized on March 19th 2016 in cooperation with the History and Maritime Museum of the Croatian Littoral and the curator of the museum Ivan Šarić Žic. This workshop is the beginning of long-term cooperation between the project Benčić Youth Council and the Museum during the exhibition “Market – the belly of the city”, which was opened March 16th 2016.
The aim of the cooperation is to create permanent educational materials by children for other children (and adults). The exhibition itself, deals with a topic that is close to everyone. The use of the phrase “belly of the city” the curator marks the position of the market in the physical sense, but also in the metaphysical center of the city and its citizens. The main market, popularly called the placa, of the city of Rijeka is located in the center of the city for over 100 years and operates in the pavilions that were built just for this purpose. On it, you can buy food, clothing and footwear and it is the daily (or weekly) destination for many citizens of Rijeka. With the rise of capitalism and large shopping centers, unfortunately, a lot of pressure fell onto the vendors at the market. Severe competition with imported products and discounts affected the quality of products that are now a part of the market offer. All of these topics and more are mentioned on the exhibition. For this workshop, children have mapped the space of the market.
Market is becoming a more frequent destination of tourists who do not have interpretive materials that will guide them during their visit. In addition, young people who have just become independent and started to manage their own purchases such material would have considerably facilitate their orientation and first steps.
The workshop began with a tour of the exhibition in PPMHP and familiarizing with the topic. After that, we went to visit the market, which is teeming with people on Saturday morning. To get to know the market and have fun during our visit, we organized a scavenger game in which children had to communicate with buyers and sellers to find out information about the work and behavior in the marketplace.
The tasks:
1. How many closed pavilions is the market is consisted of?
2. Discover what is sold in each pavilion?
3. What embossed images adorn the entrances of the individual pavilions?
4. What are the working hours of the market?
5. Find the Turkish house and find out something about it.
6. Where are the warehouses located at the marketplace?
7. Find out how old is the city market.
8. Find out what can we buy in the market except food products.
9. Identify at least two vendors who grow and sell their own vegetables / fruits.
10. Find out from which parts of the Croatia come certain foods. (At least 3 examples)
11. Is there a culture of bargaining on the city market?
12. Find out about the changes that the modern era brought to the markets. (Changes can be positive or negative – A few examples).
13. Which vegetable is in season?
14. Which fruit is in season?
15. How to recognize fresh fish?
16. Find out if sellers clean fish when you buy it.
17. Assemble a fictional menu for today’s lunch. In doing so, you can only use seasonal homegrown ingredients. What shall we eat?
18. Find 3 foods that are out of season.
19. Find 3 foods that nobody in your group has never had a chance to try and find out what they are and where they are used.
20. Gather some useful tips from experienced sellers or buyers in the market that will in the future help you to recognize and buy high quality, local and fresh products.
After the successful game, we exchanged the information and visited the top floor of Rijeka fish market. To stay within the spirit of the workshop this time we had a thematic lunch – so we ate anchovies with mangold and potatoes.
Then we returned to the museum and the children prepared in groups maps of the market. They had to include everything they have learned during the game and what they saw during the tour. The maps are going to be scanned and will be available in PDF version to for download.