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Art Reminds Us We Are Implicated in Each Others Lives
SOUNDBOARD One of the things recent events at the Mexico/US border have shown us is the power of documentation: audio, video, and photos that indelibly show the human impact of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy and all that comes with it—family separation, children in cages, “tender age” facilities for babies and toddlers, no predetermined plan for family reunification. Two of the most indelible moments for many of us: the photo of a sobbing two-year-old Honduran girl being confronted by border patrol agents and audio of 10 Central American children held in a US Customs and Border Protection facility, including a 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleading to be reunited with her father and aunt. While the viral response to these images underscores the power of documentary practices, it also raises questions worth considering for those of us in the art world: What can art do that journalism can’t? If documentation can stop us in our tracks, is it art’s job to help us move beyond that, to process what we encounter through journalism? And how does art that embodies events in the news help us achieve real understanding? In the third edition of Soundboard, we posed these questions to four artists with close links to the immigrant experience: a documentary filmmaker with lives on both sides of the border; an immigrant who entered the US illegally, on foot; a socially engaged artist and mediator; and a Somali refugee whose art often deals with trauma faced by refugee children. —Paul Schmelzer, editor DoritCypis is an artist, educator, mediator, and community-builder. Born in Tel Aviv and based in Los Angeles, she’s a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders International and founder of Kulture Klub Collaborative, a Minneapolis organization that brings artists and homeless youth together. Art Reminds Us: We Are Implicated in Each Other’s Lives BY Dorit Cypis Aug 16, 2018 Viewing the crisis of individuals who are refugees fleeing intolerable oppressive conditions, do we have the capacity to hold and comprehend the incomprehensible? When we are ignorant of the labyrinthine past to present others have experienced, what do we assume we understand? How do we recognize the confluences of perception, memories, and feelings occupying us? How do we resolve the enormous gap of social circumstance between them and us? If we are dumb in making sense of aesthetic experience, our bodily sensorial recognition of life, how then do we respond thoughtfully, not react impulsively to media representation of their crisis? We are all affected. The nonstop repetition of words and images chosen to depict a crisis is a familiar strategy of news and social media. It’s easy and efficient, gets the job done, winning viewers over with consumable, memorable moments and a satisfaction of being “in touch,” “in the know.” Meanwhile this familiar strategy robs the depicted person/s of their individual, unique, full-bodied circumstance, their context and their difference. They take on a symbolic representation of all those suffering the crisis through a particular lens not chosen by them. On the other side of the lens, the viewer too is taken for granted, served up uncomplicated, digestible information, pointed towards a position already framed binarily with winners and losers, all with the same story. Viewers assume, reject, avoid, accommodate, judge, or attack with few details and little insight into the human differences that underlie lived experience and nuanced context. When we uncritically depend on mediated shortcuts we lose each other and the intimacy of experiential recognition of the one thing we have in common, our difference. We miss the aesthetic experience of bodily sensation recognizing who we are to our self and to one another. We miss an emotional process that adds dimensional nuance to what we see, hear, and feel. We miss a social process of bodies interacting in a particular nuanced place—the opportunity to reflect, rub against, move across, ask questions, listen, give, and take. We miss dialogue and criticality. In the winter of 1996, on the occasion of a performance cabaret at the Southern Theater by young adults experiencing homelessness, I had an epiphany that altered my ability to comprehend the incomprehensible. The performing youth were like refugees, escaping intolerable oppressive home conditions perpetuated by systemic cultural inequities. They found their way to Project OffStreets, a county youth crisis center that, at the time, was located in a storefront across the street yet a world away from the Walker Art Center. One day in 1992, as I got off the bus to visit the Walker, my attention was diverted to enter the storefront. Immediately, I knew that I could not comprehend. (image) Dorit Cypis, Stand in My Shoes, 2017 I founded Kulture Klub Collaborative six months later after spending hundreds of hours at the center hanging out, listening, exchanging. This was my response to an ethical question of what an artist’s role might be in applying the aesthetics of questioning directly to social conditions. KKC’s vision was to bridge two human qualities that are so often kept as oppositional, survival and inspiration. Introducing youth who are experts at survival to artists who are experts at inspiration was a winning combination. At first neither could comprehend the other. While the youth had never before met adults who were not abusive, neglectful, overwhelmed, the artists had never before met youth who had so fallen through the cracks of American civil society. Over time these unlikely partners learned from each other. Youth were brought to professional arts venues across the Twin Cities to witness artists of all genres. Professional artists were brought to the youth to engage directly in their milieu. They experienced one another in each other’s context, recognizing and bridging their differences, unmaking their incomprehensible otherness to one another. KKC is 25 years old this year, and very much alive. That night I was the emcee on stage at the Southern Theater, introducing the evening’s cabaret presentation. As I began to introduce KKC to the audience I fell into a cognitive black hole. For a moment I lost myself and where I was, although I recall maintaining an awareness of the audience’s presence and their waiting for me to reignite. A light of recognition finally lit above my head as I resurfaced from my unconscious. “I began to say that I initiated KKC to comprehend what I cannot, these youths’ circumstances and survival, but I just realized that my deeper compulsion was to comprehend what I have never been able to, the incomprehensible 20th-century European human destruction of life and dignity, including of my own family, and the dispersion of so many via refugee status.” A shifting mirror reflection revealed equity between the youth and me. In our differences we became the same, and in my recognition of respect for them, I found a deeper empathy. Moving beyond the depictions of the news media demands a commitment of immersive engagement between people that allows for an intimacy not only between but also within. It’s not just for us to understand them. We are implicated in each other’s lives. Journalism alone cannot represent this. ©2018 WALKER ART CENTER
The Swing of the Pendulum The Urgency of Arts Education for Healing, Learning, and Wholeness
Current educational policies, particularly in the United States, have swung so far in the direction of overtly politicized and decontextualized testing, that we are losing opportunities to support the imaginative and expressive capacities of a generation of children and adolescents with implications for our individual and collective health. Enter arts education and the healing arts as urgently needed remedies for this imbalance, to swing the pendulum of educational practices back to a place of balance and wholeness.Informed by an arts-based sensibility, this book explores how imaginative, creative, and artistic experiences can heal, and why we urgently need them at the heart of our educational discourses and practices. These chapters invite teachers, teacher educators, and therapeutic professionals to reclaim imaginative, arts-based experiences as central to the human conditions that they serve. The narratives and case studies included here are of interest for any arts-based qualitative research course as an example of narrative inquiry, and in arts and general education programs for their pedagogical implications. “As Blake invited us to find the world in a grain of sand and showed us how poetry could materialize this, so too these storytellers discover and shape their personal meanings in ceramic pots, paintings, poems, drama, and poetry. While the stories told here are deeply ingrained interior journeys, all reflect ways of observing and embracing the world of others, of becoming wise, becoming self, and becoming skilled practitioners of meaning making. By naming and framing they suggest that clarity becomes possible and personal freedom achieved.” – Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia (from the Foreword) “This anthology offers a substantial number of narratives that represent seeking wholeness, sustenance, and renewal. In many cases, the authors provide a tribute to those who have impacted their lives in profound ways. This is an important contribution to both art education and literary education in the world of scholarly research.” – Laurel H. Campbell, Purdue University
The Swing of the Pendulum: The Urgency of Arts Education for Healing, Learning, and Wholeness, 2017
Current educational policies, particularly in the United States, have swung so far in the direction of overtly politicized and decontextualized testing, that we are losing opportunities to support the imaginative and expressive capacities of a generation of children and adolescents with implications for our individual and collective health. Enter arts education and the healing arts as urgently needed remedies for this imbalance, to swing the pendulum of educational practices back to a place of balance and wholeness. Informed by an arts-based sensibility, this book explores how imaginative, creative, and artistic experiences can heal, and why we urgently need them at the heart of our educational discourses and practices. These chapters invite teachers, teacher educators, and therapeutic professionals to reclaim imaginative, arts-based experiences as central to the human conditions that they serve. The narratives and case studies included here are of interest for any arts-based qualitative research course as an example of narrative inquiry, and in arts and general education programs for their pedagogical implications. “As Blake invited us to find the world in a grain of sand and showed us how poetry could materialize this, so too these storytellers discover and shape their personal meanings in ceramic pots, paintings, poems, drama, and poetry. While the stories told here are deeply ingrained interior journeys, all reflect ways of observing and embracing the world of others, of becoming wise, becoming self, and becoming skilled practitioners of meaning making. By naming and framing they suggest that clarity becomes possible and personal freedom achieved.” – Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia (from the Foreword) “This anthology offers a substantial number of narratives that represent seeking wholeness, sustenance, and renewal. In many cases, the authors provide a tribute to those who have impacted their lives in profound ways. This is an important contribution to both art education and literary education in the world of scholarly research.” – Laurel H. Campbell, Purdue University
A visual narrative analysis of children’s baby loss remembrance drawings
Journal of Family Communication, 2018
Children experiencing the death of baby brother or sister have reported individual, familial, and communicative challenges. Siblings also have indicated that the loss of a baby in their family enriched their lives despite their pain. The present study extends this work by focusing not only on siblings but also other children enmeshed in the family system. Additionally, we heed the call for the use of arts-based methods in family communication by performing a visual narrative analysis of children's baby loss remembrance drawings. This analysis of 131 drawings completed by children ages zero to 18 yielded three main themes, including narration of identity, narration of life and death, and narration of growing sense-making. Two continua capture these themes, including the subject of narrativization and the mode of narrativization. In presenting these findings, we provide a unique (means of) understanding children's experience of baby loss in the family. The field of family communication studies was created with the goal of understanding the unique experiences of the family unit. However, though conceptions of family and the experiences of family members have become increasingly complicated, the methodological approaches family communication scholars use have remained relatively fixed (Droser, 2017; Suter, 2016). In line with the recently proposed critical family communication approach (see Suter, 2016), the current study begins to push the boundaries of what is considered within the purview of family communication studies by embracing a complicated and understudied topic-bereaved children's experience of the death of a baby in the family-and engaging a less traditional type of research method-visual narrative analysis. This work explicitly answers Faulkner's (2016) call for more arts-based research within the field. Through enacting a visual