Etienne Bernardot intervened during the month of April 2023 in a cycle of educational and artistic workshops at the Hope School orphanage-school in Vietnam. He offered a real-time video creation workshop with music, adapting his own image-making process. He asked the children to manipulate objects, matter, light in front of a camera connected to a video projector. The wish is on the one hand, to initiate them in a fun way to build an aesthetic story from music and on the other hand, to make them aware of another use of new technologies.

Located in Da Nang, Trường Hy Vọng – anglicized under the name Hope School – is a school-orphanage that takes in children aged 6 to 18 whose parents died of covid. Hope School is an establishment funded by Hope Foundation which aims to encourage young people to engage in research and development of information technologies, to support social and charitable projects and in general to help the poorest Vietnamese citizens.

First of all, it is about: giving or restoring hope to these children who have lost everything by helping them to develop their imagination, to create, to dream, by introducing them to artistic disciplines to which they have everyday life that is difficult to access and which will undoubtedly make them take a fresh look at the world.
The project was born in the summer of 2022, when director Hoàng Quốc Quyền met with Đức, a French writer of Vietnamese origin. Đức first proposed to Quyền to come and do a single workshop that he would have led himself, then the project evolved and he finally decided to expand it by organizing other creative workshops that would be led by other French speakers (Vietnamese, French and Belgians mainly, but there is also an Englishman). From February until the summer school holidays, various activities will therefore be offered to Hope School students, known as “Hopers”.

Link to the workshop blog: https://ateliershopeschool.wordpress.com

Link to Hope School website: https://truonghyvong.edu.vn

Link to blog post: etiennebernardot.blog