13.05 – 24.06.2022
Hogeland College and Inspecteur Boelensschool

Artist: Sophia Bulgakova
Curator: Anastasia Loginova
Facilitators: Sander van Dijk, Renate Prins, Zeehondencentrum Pieterburen
Partners: iii instrument inventors, Werelderfgoedcentrum Waddenzee
Overseeing partner: Artport_making waves

Sophia Bulgakova is creating a sensory explorative workshop, the goal of which is to find and create a new way of experiencing and relating to the Dutch Wadden Sea area for children from local communities. The outcome of this process will be a sensory toolkit and performative guided walk made together with the youth, which the public can experience. Young students become “culture makers” conducted by a group of experienced experts in their respective fields. 

Students will be able to explore their surroundings in the new way using sensorial aspects of the sea to then reconstruct and create unique experiences for each other and potentially an outside public. 

The workshop is going to focus on educating students about their local environment as well as give them an opportunity to understand and feel it in an innovative embodied way through a series of sensorial exercises focusing on smelling, touching, listening, tasting, looking and moving the sea through which educating them on the importance of the ocean and possibilities of its preservation with personal and group actions. 

Out of the findings with children the artist will work on a combination of AR technology and physical tools to reconstruct the publics’ experience of walking along specific parts of the coast. The interactive walk will be merging possibilities within AR filters to add new perspectives to the existing landscape, with the audio narration reshaping audiences’ perception of the place with interactive physical tools hacking the other senses to complete the unique experience. 

WE ARE OCEAN: The Beauty of Proximity – Sensing the Wadden Sea project is officially endorsed by UNESCO as part of their United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) activities.  The workshop requires the students to actively meet the Wadden sea and think about how to share this experience with the public. Direct contact with the Wadden sea can increase the students’ knowledge of the sea and create a more significant connection than they had (before). Having a relationship with the sea close to them can help them with making the connection of their experience to all the oceans in the world, thus increasing their ocean literacy.