Educational intervention in the sociocultural research process for the ONOFFON project, developed in the Juan Montalvo Commune, in Ecuador.
In July this year, Mauro Rojas formed a multidisciplinary team together with Alfredo Moreira and María de los Ángeles Custoja, and with various collaborators from the arts world in Guayaquil, to apply a sociocultural research process into ancestral memory, creativity and cultural heritage.
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| María de los Ángeles Custoja with children from the Juan Montalvo commune, during the workshop. |
With the coordination by Alfredo Moreira, the connection with the Juan Montalvo commune, in the Province of Santa Elena, Ecuador, allowed these activities to be implemented in a community that was largely disconnected from national development over the last 60 years.
The connection factor with this community was crucial, because this project was designed to observe the reality of communities in rural areas, identifying their strengths and weaknesses to collect clues that allow us to build strategies to enhance the human development of peoples.
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| Children of the Juan Montalvo commune actively participating in this creative meeting. |
María de los Ángeles Custoja, archaeologist and expert in the development of applied research in rural areas, correctly collaborated in this process, sharing with the children in her Workshop of Art-therapy, a fairly profound methodology that helped us understand, through dialogue and creative interaction, certain experiences recorded in the social memory of this community.
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| Alfredo Moreira and María de los Ángeles Custoja, discussing the reality of the communes in Ecuador. |
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| One of the artworks created by the children in the art-therapy workshop. |
Thanks to the methodology implemented, and the very human touch of María de los Ángeles in her interaction with the children, the meeting flowed in such a way that, subtly, we managed to understand the dynamics of the rural communities considered forgotten by public administrations.
From this intervention, the field of observation generated a horizon of application in various areas of social development.
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| Something that made us very happy was meeting children with a great capacity to materialize their imagination, even breaking the dimensions established in the meeting. |
This is one of the first meetings in a series of creative interventions in rural areas, which are part of the root structure of the ONOFFON project, designed to study the features of the cultural identity of the peoples, to apply solutions through communication, human development, product design, and legal development.
ONOFFON is a project from the Eonminu® portfolio.
