Abour our partnership with L’École d’Art Contemporain de Luxembourg on a practical project for students: decorating our insect hotels. A great success!
The short story in video:
A collaborative project with a competition
Our insect hotels appeal to the local biodiversity. Very natural and perfect from a functional point of view, the back was nevertheless unattractive, even a little sad.
So we offered a project to L’École d’Art Contemporain and asked students to decorate the back of our insect hotels. The director, Mr. Tosello, was immediately seduced by the idea and organized a competition among classes of all ages.
The children were delighted and we received more than a dozen propositions from young artists between 6 and 16 years old. Our team selected the two winners Theodore, 8 years old and Claudia, 15 years old.
“Theodore was really surprised to be selected,” Tosello told us. “He gained confidence in himself thanks to this selection”
The making : a productive Saturday morning!
As it was already cold, we took the option of having the children work on wooden plates, in our warm meeting room, rather than having them paint outside. A much more comfortable and simple solution to implement.
Mr. Tosello took care to choose paints with no solvents and other chemical components that would have scared away insects and our young artists were able to reproduce their project on wooden plates.
“It’s much better to be able to paint big, but it’s more difficult!” Theodore.
While Theodore discovered the joys of “working for real” as he says; Claudia was already worried that she wouldn’t be able to do everything. One had to admit that her project was very detailed.
“3 hours is far too short to do all the details!” Claudia.
Everything went well: Claudia was able to finish her work in the few days that followed and both left with small gourmet memories.
Now we enjoy their creations
Once we got the art pieces back, we were able to varnish them, again with a harmless product, which was not easy to source given the weather conditions that the paintings would have to face.
Finally we could put them up last spring and we regularly happily walk by these original productions of our artists in the making.
Why a partnership with the EAC?
We could have called on confirmed artists as was the case to decorate our halls and for the sculptures that adorn our buildings but the idea of offering a small challenge, a concrete application of their work to these young people seemed more interesting and useful.
“This is an initiative that fits perfectly into our CSR policy and helps us to contribute a little bit to SDG 4: Education, which we do not touch in our core curriculum,” says Marc Diver, CEO.
And the satisfaction of the children was real, so much so that we are thinking of repeating the experience because the possibilities of creation are not lacking!
A big thank you to all the children who participated in the competition, of course to our two artists and to Mr. Tosello who gave his time and allowed this collaboration.