Duration: 3 hours
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Research or learning phase (1 hour)
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Designing and creative phase (2 hours)
Acquired skills and objectives:
- Discovering local visual culture
- Enhancing culture of origin and diversity
- Raising awareness about environment through recycling
- learning creative techniques
- experience in co-working (team and community building)
- skills in digital audio-visual content making
Playing with Your Own Rules
Creating recycled games
1. Research phase : discovering unique games which are also artworks, understanding their rules.
2. Inventing games with it's own rules and co-designing it on a recycled book shelf. Here is an example :
الثلث : The mosaic board-game
Thuluth is a board-game designed for Arabic learners and speakers at any level from beginners to native speakers (all depends on the rule you use while you’re playing with it) to practice and enrich your vocabulary.It is a combination of a decorative artwork, an educational tool and an exciting board-game, based on the relationship between the logic of Arabic word construction and Islamic geometric design and inspired both by modern Arabic calligraphy and traditional tile-works, as suggested by the game’ name? Thuluth referring both the the word “thulth” one third as the basis of both geometric design and Arabic word construction based mostly on three letters and to one of the varieties of Arabic calligraphy characterised by a cursive, fluid style.
In Arabic, most of the words are created of a root comprising three letters. It’s a system that results an admirably rich variety of words and a remarkably logical word construction.
Thuluth’s goal is to fill out the triangle’s all 36 blanks with existing words’ or word’s roots in a manner that the letters you put in three blanks next to each other forming a triangle should always have at least one meaning.
You begin placing the letters in one the three corners of the triangle, like here :
In this version, played by the three of us, we but first thee root ف ع ل of the word “make” in the corner.
The first player (A) put the letter م next to it, in the middle so that it forms now with the ع and the ل different roots such as : عمل (work), علم (science, to know), لمع (to shine, glitter).
You can read the words clockwise or counterclockwise and the word may begin with any of the three letters.
To make it simple, you can attribute one point for each word, so the player A has just won 3 points.
Then, the second player (B) has put the letter ح, a kind of jackpot as the three letters next to each other can be read in all the 6 different ways : حمل (to carry), حلم (a dream, to dean), لحم (meat), حمح (to glance), ملح (salt), محل (to be barren). In addition to these 6 roots formed by the triangle, the ح constitutes two other words forming a line with the letters ل and ف such ass : حلف (to swear) and فلح (to split, cultivate the land) in the opposite direction. The words constituting a line can be read only in these two ways and you cannot begin it with the one in the middle.
The third player ( C ) placed the letter د , not a bad choice either as it gives 6 different roots: دمع (a tear), دعم (to support), عمد (to intend or to support), عدم (to lack sth) معد (root of the word stomach, to have stomach-ache) and it also forms حمد (to bless) horizontally.
B has just won 8 points.
C has 6 points for now.
3. Once you invented your rules and co-designed your board, you will create it. Here, we used a mosaic technique by sticking elements on the board, demanding rather precise measurements but can also draw or paint them if you have to stick to a 3 hours long one time session.
Two more examples for invented board games one of them created on recycled bookshelf and the other one on the top of a wooden tea box :
To improve language skills, you can also set up a workshop in any other language based on the Thultuh game, as we did in Marseille.
First, show you student some patterns and ornaments. You can also use our "Book of ornaments" and complete it with any other item if you wish. Let them choose their favourite ones and ask them why they like them.
Book of Ornaments
♦︎♦︎♦︎
Livre des ornements
♦︎♦︎♦︎
كتاب الزخرفاات
Modern Geometric Art ♦︎ Art géométrique moderne
الفن الهندسي الحديث
Joan Miro △ جوان ميرو
Paul Klee ▽ بول كلي
Comtemporary Arabic Calligraphy
❖
Calligraphie arabe contemporaine
❖
الخط العربي المعاصر.
Sacred Geometric Ornements
◆
Ornements sacrés géométriques
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زخرفة هندسية مقدسة
Classical Arabic Calligraphy ◆ Calligraphie arabe classique
الخط العربي الكلاسيكي
The Art of Optical Illusion
◆
Art de l'illusion optique - Victor Vasarely
◆
فيكتور فازاريلي - فن الخداع البصري
Aboriginal Art (Australia) ♦︎ Art aborigène
فن السكان الأصليين (أوستاليا)
All the participants can create their own series of little triangles with patterns inspired by different types of geometric ornaments that you'll fix on a triangular board. You'll also need to cut off triangles of the same size and write letters on them for the personalized, co-created Scrabble game:
Ceramics Art from Iran ❖ Art de la céramique d'Iran ❖ فن السيراميك من إيران
Joan Miro △ جوان ميرو
Classical Arabic Calligraphy ◆ Calligraphie arabe classique ◆ الخط العربي الكلاسيكي
Sacred Geometric Ornements ◆ Ornements sacrés géométriques ◆ زخرفة هندسية مقدسة
The Art of Optical Illusion ◆ Art de l'illusion optique - Victor Vasarely ◆ فيكتور فازاريلي - فن الخداع البصري
