Lennie Varvarides and Kazimir Bielecki from Enfield arts group Dyspla introduce their latest project working with local schoolchildren

Artwork created by DYSLPA in collaboration with Orchardside School — *Artwork created by Dyspla in collaboration with Orchardside School*

Our new digital art exhibition DYSPLA_individualism was created in collaboration with excluded teenagers from Orchardside School in Bullsmoor.

The work was filmed in early 2022 at the school, which acts as a sanctuary for many students who are temporarily excluded from mainstream education. Individualism is the idea that freedom of thought and one’s individual actions are the most important qualities of a society, rather than investing in collectivism and building a sense of community. The digital exhibition consists of augmented reality poetic holograms that can be seen on the streets of Enfield Wash.

Orchardside School experienced a tragic loss of a former student who was stabbed outside the school gates in 2021. Young people already know too much about death and exclusion and too many living in Enfield feel isolated and unprotected. These feelings are evident in the poetry slogans the students created on themes of individualism and their concept of it.

“Trust yourself and look to your own, trust yourself and look to your own.”

“Follow me and forget yourself, forget myself. Follow me and forget yourself, forget myself.”

“If I want money, I work for it. If I want money, I work for it, I work for my money.”

“If I’m the target, you are the target. If I’m the target, you are the target. I’m the target, you are the target.”

We found the students to be intelligent, generous and honest with their views on life. These students, ranging from 14 to 18 years, were morally bound, insightful and able to fully commit to exploring solipsistic philosophy, cognitive and social segregation that leads to forms of ‘megalothymia’ and narcissism.

The school was accommodating and gave us the opportunity to meet and work with many teenagers over the course of the project. Because of funding limitations we were only able to offer further development to three students. We worked with them to finalise their poetry, which they performed to volumetric cameras – these capture depth information, creating 3D holograms that were manipulated in Blender, which is software used in gaming. The 3D moving images were then placed within a 360° video of various Enfield street scenes, resulting in a triptic of augmented reality prints.

Students shared their world with Dyspla, expressed a need to keep their distance, their lack of trust for authority, fears for their safety, their lack of respect for a system that does not work for them and their ultimate desire to be seen as “the golden child”, which influenced our aesthetic choices.

There is an epidemic of separation in our society. Since the late 1970s, politicians have called to escalate the ‘dog eat dog’ ideology that “there is no such thing as society” and, as a result, we are all losing out. There is an urgent necessity for a coherent community and only as a community can we all benefit individually.

For more information about Dyspla:
Visit dyspla.com

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