Community Collage
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February 2021
What does a community art project look like during the COVID-19 pandemic? It’s a question that Nadia Galvan is still grappling with.
Inspired by the Family Hub in Kelowna and the community surrounding it, Nadia’s Artist-in-Residence project proposal was to gather families together to create a collective collage. The resource centre regularly brings together parents and children from different backgrounds. She’d hoped to sit down with a group and work together to create a piece of artwork that represented their feelings about community, inclusion, and what the Family Hub means to them.
During these sessions, she’d planned to present stories, paintings, and music from artists in the region and ask the group to reflect on it. The goal: to share ideas about how other people in the Okanagan represent their thoughts about their community through art. Nadia hoped this might inspire the group to reflect on what was meaningful to them and help them represent it in the collage.
However, all this changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The vision she had of families sitting together to paint, cut and glue paper and have conversations was no longer possible. Nadia is now exploring new strategies for her project. The materials are ready to go—it’s the gathering place that has to change. One potential avenue is to host the sessions online. Families could each collage their own small piece while they share their thoughts and stories.
Connection and inclusion will be at the heart of the project no matter what new form it takes. One of the things that attracted Nadia to the AiR program was the opportunity to connect with community members outside of her role as a Behavioural Consultant. The goal of the project was—and is—to also connect community members with one another.
Nadia is currently reimagining the form the collage will take, but the questions at the core of the project remain the same: What makes us feel included? How do we include others in our community? And how can we create spaces that are inclusive to everyone?