Art-therapy workshop in Juan Montalvo

Educational intervention in the sociocultural research process of the ONOFFON™ project, developed in the Juan Montalvo Commune.

Mauro Rojas formed a multidisciplinary team together with Alfredo Moreira and María de los Ángeles Custoja, and with colleagues from the arts community in Guayaquil, to apply a sociocultural research process into ancestral memory, creativity, and cultural heritage in Juan Montalvo, commune located in Santa Elena province, Ecuador.

María de los Ángeles Custoja led the Art-therapy workshop shared with children in Juan Montalvo

Coordinated by Alfredo Moreira, we had the opportunity to connect with people from Juan Montalvo, a community that has been largely disconnected from the national economy development during fourty years. These activities took place the first week of this month.

The children from Juan Montalvo actively participated in all the activities of this meeting

The connection factor with this community was crucial, since this project was designed to observe the reality of communities in rural areas, identifying their strengths and weaknesses to collect clues that allow building strategies to enhance human development in localities from the market dynamics.

María de los Ángeles Custoja, archaeologist and professor who is an expert in the development of applied research in rural areas, successfully collaborated in this process by giving the Art Therapy Workshop, sharing face to face with the children, a sensitive methodology that helped us understand, through dialogue and creative interaction, a wide range of experiences recorded in the social memory of this community.

Alfredo Moreira and María de los Ángeles Custoja took a moment to talk about the reality of rural communities on the coast of Ecuador

The openness achieved nourished this activity by listening to the participants' stories, which flowed with a feeling of trust.

At that moment, we understood that the methodology applied during the workshop meetings in Juan Montalvo is the correct one, taking care of the human aspects as the main task.

Thanks to this methodology, 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.

Something that made us very happy was meeting children with great talent and 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 communities, to apply solutions through communication, human development, product design, and legal development, as the incubator for social projects development of Eonminu®.

→ Event: Art-therapy workshop
→ Project: ONOFFON™
→ Direction of Art-therapy workshop: María de los Ángeles Custoja
→ Venue: Communal House of Juan Montalvo, Santa Elena Province, Ecuador.
→ Coordination: Alfredo Moreira
→ Direction: Mauro Rojas
→ Production: Eonminu®
→ Year: 2011 {alertInfo}