Satellite’s Cyville Castro, Funan Fina and Sebastien Kaschel on ECU News

 

Satellite x Activism‘s Cyville Castro, Funan Fina and Sebastien Kaschel are highlighted on Emily Carr News

The emerging artists and designers were featured in a story on creative resilience, which highlights 5 distinct projects that have started in the last year and a half. 

Nobody could foresee the challenges the past year and a half would bring. While anxiety, isolation and insecurity were hallmarks of the time, this period has also been marked by innovation. Many ECU students and alumni have worked to overcome challenges and limitations, building small businesses, studios and community-driven initiatives.

Below are stories of creative resilience, showcasing the many ways the Emily Carr community continues to demonstrate adaptivity, experimentation and courage.

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Image by Flourishing Our Youths

Flourishing Our Youths

As part of the Satellite x Activism 2021 program, Cyville Castro (BDes in Industrial Design 2021) and Funan Fina (BDes in Industrial Design, 4th year) created Flourishing Our Youths, a workshop and toolkit that prompts cultural empowerment and community for immigrant youths facing disconnection and isolation.

Drawing from their own experiences as Filipino and Indonesian immigrants, Cyville and Funan wanted to help youths feel belonging through design. Their toolkit includes a collaborative card game called Face It designed to prompt conversations around micro-aggressions and teach players how to respond in certain scenarios. The game nudges participants to look deeper within themselves, beyond the things society imposes on them, and hopefully learn to reclaim their identity and take pride in their heritage.

During the development of this project, Cyville and Funan became widely aware of the rise of discrimination, hate and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This emphasized the importance of Flourishing Our Youths, and motivated them to continue reaching out to the immigrant community.

 

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Image by Project PaintUp

 

Project PaintUp 

Created by Sebastien Kaschel (BDes Film + Screen Arts, 3rd year) as part of the Satellite x Activism 2021 program, Project PaintUp is a series of drawing workshops created to inspire youth through the fun and liberation of art-making.

Project PaintUp saw Sebastien returning to his high school, the White Rock Learning Centre, to instruct weekly hour-long classes where students designed hoodies using fabric paints, creating something that became uniquely theirs.

What started as a five-minute instruction on different drawing techniques soon morphed into a more free-flowing session, where instructor and student alike could experiment, collaborate and let loose while mark-making. Driven by the increased need for mental health and youth support, Project PaintUp draws on art therapy to help build connections and help others heal through art.

In the future, Sebastien hopes to continue running this initiative and introduce it to the Downtown Eastside community.

Learn more about Flourishing our Youths here and watch a short documentary  on Project PaintUp here.

You can find the whole article and read about other Emily Carr community members’ work on Emily Carr University News.