Hello everyone and welcome to the April edition of our A4 fanzine In & Around. As you already know in A4 there is four of us EVS volunteers from abroad, while three of us put this zine together. In this edition we are going to introduce you our friend and the fourth EVS – Tinatin Bulashvili (Tina) from Georgia.
Tina had a great Erasmus+ experience from before she came to Bratislava. When she was still in high school she discovered the Youth Exchange programs from a friend of her mother and started participating in the organization that works around youth and LGBTIQ awareness. She participated in a number of short-term projects in Georgia and abroad during which she met people from different countries and learned about all the possibilities of mobility within Erasmus+.
As a volunteer in the “ICPI – International Center for Peace and Integration organization” in Georgia, she helped other EVS volunteers by being their mentor – a local person/friend, who helps you integrate and feel more welcomed in the new country and culture. Ever since she knew she wanted to make such an exchange but wanted to finish her Bachelor studies in Archeology first.
In A4 we all help with production and events organization, EVS promotion and PR and we also work on our personal projects. Tina particularly takes care of the cultural center’s Instagram. Being a volunteer was a bit confusing for her from the beginning because she had so many expectations and wanted to do everything for herself and her project but then realized that there are other great aspects of being an EVS she didn’t expect. She started to cherish her free time, meeting other volunteers all around Slovakia, traveling and having the freedom to think about her future.
Interview with Gosia Cwiech
This month we are presenting a poster made by Gosia Ćwiech who is currently working with photography and exploring a theme of the passage of time. Below you can see a very interesting interview we made with her.
Magdalena Tsaneva : Tell us about yourself and how you decided to work with art and photography in particular?
Gosia Cwiech : I started studying art in college where I was doing a lot of different subjects. I was mainly interested in painting, but before creating the paintings I was taking photos and combining few elements from them into one painting. Through this I realized that maybe just taking photographs is better for meand after finishing college I applied fora few different courses. I got accepted in both painting and photography, but decided to go with photography.
M.T : How do you create your
works, what inspires you?
G.C : I combine different type of images – still life, landscape and a little bit of portraiture to create a photo series. I try to create stories that somehow communicate the things that concern me but at the same time other people can relate to. For instance, recently I have been working on a project about how we understand the passage of time. I started working on this, because lately time has become a quite an important subject for me. I realized that I do things in circles where I am almost like a machine.
M.T : What inspired you to do this work that we are showing in “In & Around”?
G.C : I was looking through different theories of time from a scientific point of view and I was reading a book by Carlo Rovelli who is an Italian physicist explaining how we understand this topic in common-sense scenarios. Some of these theories you can see in my photographic series.
M.T : And what story are you telling trough this particular photograph?
G.C : This is based on something I read in the book of Carlo Rovelli. This is a picture that relates to the black holes. I was particularly interested in the black holes and this idea that if you enter it, whether there is a possibility of escaping it. This is something related to life as well, because I think everything is like a circle. I am interested in how you can escape the circle.
M.T : What did you want to be when you were a child?
G.C : I always wanted to be a hairdresser. I used to like playing with hairstyles and with my friends we always made those sessions where we were making funny hairstyles.
KINO INAK
4 reasons to watch High life By Laura Carneros
The 29th of April the movie “High life” will be screened in A4 as part of the English friendly cinema program. Why do we think it could be interesting?
1. Robert Pattinson.
A long time ago this actor became famous because of the saga Crepúsculo. As his partner of crew, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson has starred other independent movies far from that super production to redefine his career. In this one, for example, performs a guy which role experiments a great transformation.
2. Claire Denis.
This veteran French director has an extense filmography full of different genders: thriller, comedy or social cinema. Always under a particular point of view which she adopted in her beginnings learning from directors as Jim Jarmusch or Wim Wenders.
3. Science Fiction.
The original screenplay of this movie was written by the own Denis and two more scriptwriters.
This story proposes a hypothetical future where a group of dead sentenced is sent to a space mission instead of continuing their condemns.
4. Sex.
One of the main topics of this movie is human reproduction and all the problems that it involves in an ethical way. This is not a common subject in a science fiction movie, where usually this topic doesn’t exist.