A DIFFERENT TULIP
tulip online, tulip tour / Black Box pen
Like all of us, children from the Boarding School for the Visually Impaired ran to safety as soon as the pandemic broke out in early March. Our Tulip children were suddenly nowhere to be found. We had never had to look into where boarding school children had their families and permanent homes. The search was long and the discoveries surprising: children’s homes, settlements and poverty, as well as difficult family destinies, often without an opportunity for any sort of, never mind online contact.
But over the four months that we stayed at home, we grew into a new ‘Tulip’ family, much more diverse and united than before, because parents, educators, grandmothers and siblings all had to join forces willy-nilly ‘over the internet’. And they did an excellent job.
These demanding months gave birth to TULIP ONLINE – hundreds of conversations, a sea of beautiful coloured drawings and testimonies from all corners of Slovakia that brought us joy, encouraged us and inspired us to push on through our joint online evaluation. Still, despite all those hundreds of online connections – we miss each other.
This is why we later came up with TULIP TOUR – a summer vacation tour of the organiser and volunteers of A Tulip For You across Slovakia visiting Tulip children in their homes, both real and substitute.
Then comes September. We will be meeting for perhaps the fifteenth time now – sighted children and children with visual impairments – at the International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra 2020, where children will get to see each other’s art made during quarantine in TULIP ONLINE and a short video about our travels across Slovakia in TULIP TOUR. They will also introduce themselves to the public through the BLACK BOX pen.
Friday, 25 September
10:00 – 17:00, Synagogue, Svätoplukovo námestie
Arts, crafts and music workshop A Tulip For You + drum session with Thierry Ebam
Saturday, 26 September
Sunday, 27 September
13:00 – 18:00, Svätoplukovo námestie
Black Box pen – an area for the sighted about the unsighted, this year’s edition is outdoors, joined with the exhibition TULIP ONLINE – the art of visually impaired children made ‘over the internet’ during quarantine
Project supported by:
Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic
City of Bratislava
Project leader:
ac. sculpt. Elena Kárová
Further information about a project you can find THERE.
