Summer School “City Printing”, a part of the Benčić Youth Council project, was held from 9th to 13th July 2018. This workshop was developed and realized in cooperation with the Center grafičnih umetnosti from Maribor, Slovenia, in accordance with our annual theme of crafts and handwork.
Center grafičnih umetnosti is organized as a creative and social hub, where creators, through the implementation of various programs, establish relationships with students, lovers of creative work, artists and craftsmen, the unemployed and other vulnerable groups and allow them to express themselves in a wide range of graphic techniques. The basic principle of open graphic workshops is the creative engagement for different segments of public life, through which we actively interact with professionals, laics and the general population through the development of cooperation, new ideas and artistic approaches, and encourage intergenerational relationships and social consolidation of localities through tangible visual images. Through free access to open-source graphic programs and workshops, a creative home is created that fosters different expressions, new ways of engaging through art and introducing art in a simple, interesting and fun way.
The aim of the summer school was for children to get familiar with different types of print that can be applied to different materials and in that way create their own work of art or a fashion creation. Through the summer school we learned what this was a high printing, and we tried out high and permeable printing. We started the practical part with the frottage, then the high printing of relief surfaces of the city and continued with the silk and cardboard printing (high printing) that we used to create new pillows for our space.
During our days together, we had established our own printing studio in which we have created works on the topic of the value of manual work which we have then transferred on to the silk and printed on fabric, paper and cardboard. The last day of the workshop the parents came to our studio and kids became thir teachers of printing. Each parent had the opportunity and tried out one type of print by printing the child’s work / silk on the selected material.