2020 was quite a year.
The students on the very first EFI Currents course were working under extraordinary circumstances.
They were under lockdown, communicating with teachers and peers through virtual portals, dealing with all the emotional, mental and physical stressors the virus put us all under and all the while looking it right in the eye.
They bravely engaged with complex and up-to-the-minute material exploring myriad aspects of the unprecedented global challenge facing the world and responded with openness, generosity, thoughtfulness and creativity.
Most if not all of the students on the course are not professional artists. They are students of Spanish and History, Sustainable Development, Business with Marketing, Social Anthropology and much else. They were working with the tools available to them. They were working on their own, at home, in uncertain circumstances. And still they were able to create.
EFI is delighted to present this selection of work from the Currents course. The exhibition begins with the work of those first brave students, and continues to showcase following years of Currents assets. This course serves as an example for many courses being designed at the Institute now and in future… courses that will tackle other global challenges and ask students to learn and create in new ways; embracing data, interdisciplinarity and their own infinite creativity. For a variety of reasons (including copyright and accessibility concerns, which we hope to mitigate in future as we learn how best to guide the students through the process of producing creative assets for assessment and exhibition), we are not able to showcase all the work produced on the course, however we hope this selection gives you a taste of the dynamic range of form and content produced by the students.
This platform is also a pilot, in that EFI is committed to encouraging students to produce creative work and in the process of exploring dedicated platforms to best showcase this work. We hope for now this site provides an easy mechanism via which to engage with these thought-provoking offerings.
Keep in touch with our work here, on the EFI website or by joining the EFI mailing list.
Many thanks,
Jennifer Williams (Creative Producer, EFI Culture & Community Team)
Andy Cross (Currents Course Co-director and EFI Education Fellow)
Jen Reid and Genevie Fernandes (Currents Course Team)
Also to note:
When assets did not have an obvious image available to represent them, and where the student did not wish to have their image included as part of the showcase, we have selected images primarily from the extraordinary collection in the official United Nations COVID-19 Response Creative Content Hub and other open sources, for which we are very grateful. These have been acknowledged with links to the creator at the bottom of each relevant page.
Featured Image: from Annie Heaney’s Creative Asset
