Communication 2
Reflection on workshop 2 - Facilitating public engagement
Led by Yuka Oyama
Strategies in Art Project Development
Communication is the most important thing in participatory art projects. Yet, communication is extremely challenging since people have so different ways to communicate. It keeps surprising me, how the results of my participatory artworks are always different than I expected, and big part of this is because of the differences in communication.
Collaboration with stakeholders makes it easier to get attention of a larger audience through their already established communication channels. To create new ways to communicate and build new connections to people can take a lot of time and effort.
If the participatory project is demanding a lot of commitment and for a longer time from the participants, it is necessary to make sure they are going to make it through the project for example by interviewing them in the beginning. Yuka presented her project, where she had created costumes for her participants based on their stories, and the participation required several meetings including the final performance by the participants. How to build the kind of a mutual trust that a participation of this kind requires? One way to engage the public that Yuka introduced is to ask them to bring some things to the project. Yuka asked people to bring small things they didn’t need anymore in their homes that I thought was a nice thing to ask, because everyone has those kinds of things and it is nice to find use for them rather than throw them away.
Comparison with Workshops
Both workshops were about participatory art practices where stories were collected from participants. In both workshops we discussed, how to interview people and how to find participants for the interviews. The workshops made me think about, how to collect stories as an artist, how to use them in a respectful way and how to reach out to different kinds of people and make art with and for them. In the Workshop 1 we heard about Eliot Moleba’s working processes to collect stories and turn them into what he calls Monu(mo)ments. He works with people in Oslo that have various immigrant backgrounds collecting stories from them of everyday life with personal importance. The stories are collected in as original form as possible, letting people to talk for themselves. In Eliot’s workshop I got the impression he used his contacts a lot to find people. I wonder if he also went to specific places, such as Grønland to ask if people he met there wanted to participate. In recruiting participants, it is important to think who we want to participate and how to reach to them, and this was discussed in both workshops. Yuka mentioned it is important for artists to be available at times that are the most suitable for the participants wanted, thinking for example parents of small kids. It is also important to think about what places are easily accessible, such as using already existing platforms and communities. Food is a good way to make art projects more accessible for participants. An amulet of the artwork is a good thank you gift to give to the participants in the end of the project.
In Yuka’s workshop we were introduced to tools to attract participants, such as accessible visual communication, that was very useful to me. Yuka’s tip for visual communication was to make it fun, which she demonstrated for example with giving us cute dolls she had made herself. Her method was to use emotionally evocative objects to help the participants to tell their stories. In one of her projects for example, she used small objects that people who move a lot keep carrying with them around the world. We discussed about probe kits as a helping tool for interviewing participants for art projects. Probe kit, or engagement activity kit, is a small package with object or objects and instructions what to make with it. The participant then uses the kit to fulfil the assignment, and doing this is supposed to lure out the story for the interview. Yuka mentioned it is good to use auto ethnographic method before involving participants, that means testing first yourself and then share with others. I felt like it was easier to participate in Yuka’s method of helping the stories to be told with objects. One more thing Yuka was talking about the importance of things was actors network theory that suggests that body movement connected to setting of things is something that stays even when people are struggling with their memory.
On the second day of Eliot’s workshop, we got to try to turn Eliot’s stories into Monu(mo)ments. In Yuka’s workshop we made our own probe kits for our own projects and this I thought was much more useful and interesting for the development of my practice.
In both workshops examples were given how the stories of the people can be returned to public spaces. In Eliot’s workshop the stories are turned into permanent monuments. Not everyone goes to theater, but monuments can’t be completely ignored because they are in the public space. His aim is to make the monuments relatable for larger audience and possible for the audience to interact with the artwork in a way that makes it grow with every visit. Yuka collected stories about being at home in different places from people who move a lot. She used the participants’ small objects as inspiration to make human-size costumes for them to wear at a performance in a public space.
Yuka introduced us to probe kits as a method to make people tell stories. The probe kits she shared with us contained dolls, paints and brushes. She asked us to paint someone we know that it two generations older. This is my grandmother Alli.
Led by Helena Elias
In the introductory talk of the workshop Helena Elias talked about a repeating motif of a young girl drawing the profile of her fiancée who is about to go to a war by following edge of its shadow. The girl’s dad who is ceramicist then turns the drawing into a bust of clay. This is where we also started the physical work of the workshop, we drew lines of shadows and used pieces of clay as pens. At a later state of the workshop, we drew whatever imaginary lines on paper and then built three-dimensional clay sculptures starting from following the lines. But what does all this say about the importance of materiality in artistic production? I notice now, writing this reflection that this wasn’t clear to me during the workshop.
I was struggling to find a relevance in the workshop in a deeper level for my artistic practice, because I couldn’t see beyond the play with clay, which in itself tough was useful as a kind of a meditative break of the usual study pace. The setting of the space in Formsalen for the starting lecture, because of the tricky projector, was disturbing my attention a lot and I couldn’t write almost any notes unfortunately and this affected my thought process too. Thinking about the workshop now, a few days later, and especially talking with peers about it, has made me realise that the workshop was very relevant for me in a point of view of communicating material processes and material choices of my artworks. The discussion sparked a motivation in me to write this reflection that I was struggling a lot with too, and writing this gave me new useful thoughts to work on.
In the workshop we were talking about how where the materials come matters. Clay is an especially good example of this because it can be found in many places around the world, but the clay types are different. Clay forms from different stone species by weathering process as part of the great circulation of matter. Secondary clay types have been drifted to the sea where they have formed sediments. Helena had brought ball clay from Portugal and if I understood correctly, she had dug it herself from the ground. Ball clay is fine grained, highly plastic sedimentary clay that commonly consist of kaolinite, mica and quartz (source: The Kaolin and Ball Clay Association (UK)). In contrast to Helena’s clay, we had kind of anonymous bought clays. We also used recycled clay from the ceramics workshop at KHiO and went outside Formsalen to collect whatever material from the ground to add to our work. Another point of view to working with materials was that shaped material that has a form and design is evidence of a human agency. This we experimented by mixing different types of powdered clay and graphite powder and made our own drawing equipment of them.
> We mixed different kinds of clays and graphite with water to make clay paints. We also drew with dried pieces of clay. At a later state of the workshop we turned some of the drawings three dimensional by building clay sculptures on top of them.
Led by Eliot Moleba
In the workshop we heard about Eliot Moleba’s working processes to collect stories and turn them into what he calls Monu(mo)ments. He works with people in Oslo that have various immigrant backgrounds collecting stories from them of everyday life with personal importance. The stories are turned into permanent monuments. His aim is to make the monuments relatable for larger audience and possible for the audience to interact with the artwork in a way that makes it grow with every visit. The stories are collected in as original form as possible, letting people to talk for themselves. One of the aims of the work is to make the amount of people with immigrant background in Oslo and the diversity of their backgrounds visible.
Not everyone goes to theater, but monuments can’t be completely ignored because they are in the public space. We talked about different kinds of monuments. Some monuments are traditional statues, some are more thought-provoking, and some are actively involving the audience. We also talked about the different ways different kinds of monuments have been treated in Oslo. For example, Eliot was talking about a street named after a brown person that is not the main street in Grønland but a street parallel to it. Also, many of the few monuments of non-Norwegian persons in Norway are monuments about violence. Eliot talked also about his past projects. He mentioned a project about genital mutilation in South Africa to discuss if some works are not meant for everyone to see and how to deal with this. The workshop made me think about many things. What is a good monument, and what ways are there to make monuments more active? How to collect stories as an artist, how to use them in a respectful way and how to reach out to different kinds of people and make art with and for them.
On the second day of the workshop, we got to try to turn Eliot’s stories into Monu(mo)ments. Practicing this new way to turn a story into an artwork was very useful for me and it’s probably something I’m going to practice more. Hearing about Eliot’s research and practicing his method was interesting, but working with another artist’s on-going project as a mandatory school assignment was problematic. I would have wished we either did the whole process from beginning collecting our own stories or tried to work on our own projects using the “Making Monu(mo)ments” process. We got a question to think about that was something like this: what kind of a response / form of engagement I want to receive through storytelling in my practice? This is useful to think about, I just wish more of that thinking could have happened during the workshop since we didn’t get back to it.