During one amazing week from 5th to 12thof September 2012 the team of EprojectConsult (Nino, Federica, Veranika and Alex) and 36 participants from Italy, Romania, Latvia, Ukraine, Armenia, Greece and Turkey have experienced huge tsunami of fashion and cultures!
The reason of this energizing wavein a small town GeraciSiculo (Italy) was a project “Dress to express” under Youth in Action Programme Sub-Action 3.1. The main topics of this project were European awareness, art, culture, and, of course, fashion tendencies & national lifestyles.Participants had an opportunity to explore cultural differences by non-formal methods of learning.
Our first two days were full of ice-breaking games, long informal discussions and facebook checkingJ to know each other better. Also in these days Italians as representatives of host country began the parade of national workshops. Before coming to the project each country group had a task to prepare activities, which could help people to understand cultural differences through modern fashion tendencies in each country. The result of this was really great and original!
- Italy. This group prepared cuttings for woman and man from fashion magazines and asksto make models, which fashion style was to be Italian.
- Latvia. The aim of Latvian workshop was to create life-sized poster in the shape of the human body. This poster should have been dressed with different colorful pieces of paper.
- Romania. After Romania presented typical hats of their country, the participants had the task to design their version of hat.
- Armenia. We had an opportunity to make special Armenian bracelet in the colors of Armenian flag.
- Turkey. Participant’s task was to reconstruct national flag of Turkey and combine it with the flag of the home country in a collage.
- Greece. Because it is common to wear cranky sunglasses in Greece, we were preparing our own “cranky sunglasses”.
- Ukraine. Ukraine finished marathon of national workshop with the idea to create Ukrainian traditional shirt made of paper.
At the weekend we visited cities of Cefalu and Castelbuono at the province of Palermo. After a lot of sun, sea and gelato, participants were relaxed and ready to come back to “methodological” part of the project with the second breath. But it wasn’t the end of surprises, the municipality of GeraciSiculo organized for participants traditional Sicilian dinner with pasta, cheese, barbecue and red wine in the mountains.
Unfortunately, 6 days of activities passed very quickly. But I am sure that every person will remember our outstanding “EUROPEAN FASHION SHOW”, which was the final result of the project. Beautiful models, professional staff, real stage and talented showman made together our last evening at GeraciSiculoreally incredible!
In the end I want to say that such projects help young people to find a lot of new friends, to understand better other cultures and simple to have fun. Do you agree with me?
Veranika Bystrova
STAFF…i’m really VIP or curly Bielorussa (Belarus)