Danis Welt
During the 2020 Corona lockdown, a friend of mine, Dani Varga, grew really unhappy with her job situation: as a kindergarten teacher, she couldn’t be in touch with “her” kids anymore. This worried her specifically because a lot of these kids have migrant backgrounds — by being locked out of kindergarten, some effectively lost touch with the German language. What could be done? After days of discussion, we started a (German-language) YouTube channel for them: Danis Welt.
This turned into us releasing a 20-40min episode every morning (Monday-Friday), with me doing a live drawing for each of them. Children (and adults) sent in 10-20 drawings per episode, which were presented in one of the following episodes. The channel quickly accumulated over 6000 channel views, with the Facebook page gathering 300+ followers on its first day.
Selected Episodes
Selected Drawings
Obviously, my visual output for this project differed drastically from the works produced in the studio. There are still various points of connection: the empowering of (young) individuals to care about each of their creations, the openness to pursue a drawing to whatever it becomes, the willingness to create a drawing based on any narrative fragment: and the will towards positivity.
Within two weeks, the project was reported on by national daily newspaper Die Presse:
Later on, the project got nominated for the prestigous Bank Austria Sozialpreis, as one of three Viennese projects focussing on a social agenda in relation to kids:
