On Monday, April 7th, and Wednesday, April 9th, a new edition of the Essarp Art Festival took place, the annual gathering that brings together students from bilingual member schools of the English Speaking Scholastic Association of the River Plate (ESSARP) around art. As is tradition, Belgrano Day School was once again the host venue for this true creative celebration, which has spent more than a decade promoting artistic and cultural exchange between institutions.
Over both days, nearly 60 students from 20 schools took part in a range of expressive activities that invited them to imagine, experiment, and share. Participating schools included: St. Brendan’s College; St. John’s School (4 campuses); St. Paul’s College; Florida Day School; Cardenal Newman; St. Mary of the Hills; St. Hilda’s College; Michael Ham; Sworn Junior College (Belgrano); St. George’s College Quilmes; St. Margaret’s School; St. Catherine’s Moorlands School (Belgrano); St. Alban’s College; St. Mary of the Hills (Pilar); Bede’s Grammar School and Barker College.
Senior Essarp Art Festival
Monday was the turn of the secondary school students, who immersed themselves in activities combining critical thinking, aesthetic exploration, and reflection on the contemporary world.
The day was organized around four themes proposed by BDS’s Arts, Design & ICT Department:
- Interspecies perspectives & the non human world: imagining hybrid beings between the human and the non-human, shaped by technology, plant life, or animals.
- Follow the story: using an image as a starting point to create a visual story: what happened before? what will happen next?
- Light & Colour – Overlapping Slides: projecting slides onto a screen, layering images, playing with light, and painting at the same time.
Junior Essarp Art Festival
Wednesday was the turn of the primary school students, who had their artistic experience through playful and collaborative activities:
- 100th Anniversary: ART DECO Vitraux: designing and creating stained-glass style pieces inspired by Art Deco, using acetate and permanent markers.
- Matisse Cut-Outs and Stamps: visual compositions made from colored paper cut-outs inspired by Matisse’s work, combined with rubber stamps created by the students themselves.
- Collaborative Mural: a collective mural over 10 meters long, decorated with patterns and lines in black marker, as a joint expression of teamwork.
As every year, the Essarp Art Festival was a true celebration of art and creativity. A space for students and teachers from different schools to meet, share, and express themselves through art, strengthening the bonds between educational communities and highlighting the power of art as a universal language.
