By Nicole Rademacher
VE Volunteer from North Carolina, USA
Nicole Rademacher is an American video artist currently based in Santiago. She completed her BFA in 2004 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA at Alfred University in 2008. She has exhibited and screened work world-wide including Transmediale, Art Beijing 2010, Streaming Festival, LOOP Video Art Festival, Primavera Fotográfica, among others. She has been working with VE Global since 2010.
We’ve been doing Taller Clik at D Sav (as we VE volunteers call it) since the last week of July. Despite their young age (9 – 14), I am constantly impressed with their innovation and ability to grasp abstract ideas.
The idea of the workshop is to look at imagery and give the students tools to “see” differently. Using normal point-and-shoot cameras, we have explored texture, perspective, pattern, color, balance, framing, background… The further we go into the workshop the more the kids have taken over with their ideas. I see my role as their instructor not solely as a transmitter of knowledge, but rather as a guide, where I too must adapt to their needs and wants.
And that is what we are doing! Slowly the pictures have started mutating from purely formal imagery to communicating narrative. As we develop our eye through the viewfinder, we are also developing our directing skills as photographers. Using our classmates as models (or actors), we took photos of moments in the middle of a story. For the rest of October we are going to explore our own narratives – looking at documentary as a form of storytelling.