Rural Cultural Life

Due to the unexpected leave from one of our volunteers we are URGENTLY LOOKING FOR A VOLUNTEER who is willing to join our team and participate in our project CULTURAL LIFE IN RURAL AREAS.

Brief description of the project:
Live and work in a small village in Spanish mountains, in a cultural and artistic organization, combining rural life with organization of cultural activities. Creative workshops in villages in the region. Creation of group sculpture. Organization of monthly events. Maintenance of our vegetable garden. Personal Project. Your colleagues: Dorien Jongsma (general coordinator); Kevin Recuero (work-coordinator); Carmen Busto (mentor); Édouard Edy (volunteer).

The principal activity of this project is group creation.

The cultural association Imágenes y Palabras, in permanent search of cultural activity and diversity in the rural areas of northern Spain, uses the cultural action as a method and a tool to fight against depopulation of small villages. The association has been active in the region, in the field of arts and culture, over the past 20 years. For the coming year we launch the following project:

The creation of a cross-generational, multidisciplinary and intercultural group work of art in rural area.

Summarizing, the idea is to create a context whereby we facilitate participants of the diverse activities we propose, to reach a direct collaboration in the creation process. The groups with which we work are very diverse: school-children, people from surrounding villages, artists in residence, visitors coming for holidays and also volunteers together with tutors and coordinators of the organization.
For each target group we will adapt methods of work and formats to use in creationprocesses. We cover a wide range of artistic disciplines: sculptural and pictorial arts, theatre, writing and also construction and landart interventions.

Simultaneously, we will work in and around “El Hacedor”, the base of the association, to maintain the arts gallery, the workshops and the surrounding environment. This work includes the organization of exhibitions (both inside the gallery and in the open air), maintenance of the vegetable garden, planting of aromatics, caring of animals (donkeys) and general conservation of infrastructures.

During freetime we introduce volunteers to places “normal tourists” wouldn’t find so easily: small enterprises of the region, geographical jewels and amazing, hidden corners. Thus, we impulse a permanent dialogue between volunteers and habitants from the region.

For volunteers with an artistic interest, we invite them to develop their creativity in a personal project. Their creations will be part of, and will increase, the collection of artworks of Imágenes y Palabras.

We wish to organize this activity with the help of international volunteers of the European Solidarity Corps to enrich the experience on a cultural, artistical and linguistical level. The volunteers will work, next to the coordinators, in all phases of the organization to come to a satisfactorily result.

Volunteers work and live in the base of Imágenes y Palabras, cultural association with residence in a small hamlet in the North of the province of Burgos (Spain). Volunteers will work together with Kevin Recuero, actually the coordinator of the hostel and daily work in the village and Dorien Jongsma, the general coordinator of the association.

The silence of the village and the huge, empty surroundings make coexistence during daily life a very intense experience. Independently of what volunteers learn during work on a practical level, the experience is social and human, is of respect and confidence, appreciation and values. We hope, both volunteers in this project and students from the schools, artists in residence, visitors of El Hacedor and habitants of the villages, with this initiative will understand a little bit better the meaning and the significance of the word “inter-cultural”.