Footscray Primary School has been a bilingual Italian school since 2021, with students doing half their classes in Italian.
With art being one of those classes, who better to teach them than an Italian-Australian artist.
That’s exactly what’s been happening recently at Footscray Primary thanks to a grant from Creative Victoria’s Creative Learning Partnerships program.
The grant allows schools to work with an artist-in-residence of their choice in a partnership that is designed to benefit both the students and the artist.
Once Footscray Primary secured one of the grants, the choice of artist-in-residence was a straightforward one: local Italian-Australian artist Daniele Poidomani, aka, Memetica.
Specialising in large-scale, often ephemeral artworks, Memetica’s proposal to the school was to spend four weeks helping students make an inflatable piece about a topic of their choosing, and then discuss that topic from within an inflated tent.
“Our bilingual students were thrilled to work with a real Italian artist,” said the school’s art teacher Anna Zobel.
“They chose topics as far-ranging as Minecraft, gendered beauty standards, littering, and veganism.
“Memetica supported them to create their own inflatables, which behaved like ’speech bubbles’ – each was attached to the top of an inflated tent, and functioned as a conversation prompt for visitors to our final exhibition.”
The recent exhibition marked the end of the month-long residency program which Ms Zobel hailed as a great success.
“It was a truly cross-curricular undertaking, with students creating art, writing about their topics in their inquiry units, and learning about various scientific processes. When the students exhibited their work, the whole school came through, including the parents. It brought our community together.”
