Indice degli argomenti
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Introduction
Using visual arts in storytelling helps to find in yourself and in the group new viewpoints and interpretations on difficult questions or complex situations or disagreements you wish to address. Expressing and visualizing inner worlds by literary making sense of them in an individual or collective artwork, opens new pathways for exchanging narratives and common understanding. Making art together helps to divert thinking and focus on the present. Making art together helps to slow down, to listen, to contemplate and meditate. This stimulates the emergence of creative flow and resonance, within yourself and in a group. Thus, through collective art making a setting is created to connect with others on a deeper level, engage conversations about life, things that occupy your mind and find ways to express things together. Silence, listening, thoughtful expression, making space in the noise of never-ending news and messages.
Making together induces narratives. It creates space for narrative accountability practices, through slow conversations from heart to heart while drawing, painting, sewing, sawing, weaving, molding, carving or hammering. To the heart of the matter, visualizing the magic of togetherness and shared values. Presenting individual art pieces together or as collective art, or making a community art piece together, is a common journey, where all participants leave a trace, a part of their story. In one common piece differences are made visible. Common work, composed by different hands, different views, different styles, different colours.
Hereafter we will offer you a series of maker’s activities, mostly based on the art traditions of experimental art related to automatism, expressionism, surrealism. Their perception on art is inclusive and based on experiment, fantasy, expression of emotions about life itself. Rather than performing perfect art techniques, artists work on personal inward perception of reality based on spontaneity and self expression of emotions, personal views, dreams, nightmares, folktales.
Automatism in art has been developed by artists related to the Surrealist Movement. In the Manifesto on surrealism, André Breton defined surrealism as … pure psychic automatism ... the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns.
Automatic drawing for instance is aiming at drawing without intervening consciously to guide the hand. Like the automatic writing techniques, automatic drawing has a strong influence on expressing your own authentic inner world and therefore is very interesting to use for storytelling - and narrative accountability purposes as an ignite activity, to build confidence in a short time and they will find freedom for expressing one’s voices and perspectives from within. and so that in the making process people feel the resonance of commoning and togetherness.
Max Ernst, a surrealist visual artist would also develop techniques such as Frottage (rubbing), grattage (scraping) and collage techniques. All are related to spontaneity, use of materials at hand and to experiment what happens, when rubbing with a pencil on piece of paper to get the print of a coin, of branches and stones outside to grasp the texture of things. Instead of painting with brushes, he would scrape the paint of, with the backside of the brush or with the painter’s knife. (See picture)
ãSandra Geelhoed (2003), gouache on paper
Rubbing can be defined as a fun and tactile way to discover surroundings of the neighbourhood. And collage are interesting practices to get people involved through art while using materials from everyday circumstances. (for more information look at this website of Tate.
Also Cobra Artists worked as of 1948 in an experimental way with different materials. Back to the basics of materiality, colours (red, yellow, blue), craftsmanship, folktales and children’s art were a source of inspiration to these artists. They made a manifesto, underlining that they would like to contribute to reconstruction of the world after World War II through imagination, fantasy and play. Giving back colour to a world in ruins, painting the world from an inner drive: dreams, stories, fantasy, spontaneous and free from any (art) convention.
Karel Appel underlines how art practice can contribute to expression of experience and therefore tell a story: “My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast. To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream. It is a night. It is like a child. It is a tiger behind bars”. For more information look at website of Museum Cobra (https://cobra-museum.nl/?lang=en)
Using visual art methods should preferably be combined with looking at art works before starting to make art and do collective exercices with art tools. We had the opportunity to work in Museum Cobra for a day, to discover and develop some of the tools beneath. Thanks for Museum Cobra (https://cobra-museum.nl/?lang=en) in Amstelveen to receive us and letting us experiment with a tour, workshops and interventions.
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Use a tool that you enjoy. It might make a nice clean line or move smoothly across the page. What it is let it feel good to use.
Consider taping the paper down to table you work on with painters tape. It is easier to stay in a flow state, not thinking about the paper to slip.
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Round 1. Particpants all take one colour. Participants may only look at the person in front and may not look on their paper while drawing. They need to draw blindly. People will stress out. Set the timer on 2 minutes.
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Round 2. Participants pass on their colour to their neighbour. Participants may now continue drawing the portrait, they may look, adapt the drawing. Timer 3 minutes.
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Round 3. Participants pass on their colour to their neighbour. They may continue the painting by looking adapting. Timer on 3 minutes
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Round 4. Participants pass on the last colour to their neighbour. This last round they may again not look at the paper only look at the person in front and finish up the portrait. Timer on 1 or 2 minutes.
Above art works are made in workshop at Museum Cobra in September 2023.
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1. Introduction Theory
For this section, we got inspired by the work of Nathalie Goldberg. She published a groundbreaking book called Writing down the bones. Freeing the writer within.(Shambhala, 1986). From the backover of her handbook we can read the following: With insight, humor, and practicality, Natalie Goldberg inspires writers and would-be writers to take the leap into writing skillfully and creatively. She offers suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer's craft: on writing from "first thoughts" (keep your hand moving, don't cross out, just get it on paper), on listening (writing is ninety percent listening; the deeper you listen, the better you write), on using verbs (verbs provide the energy of the sentence), on overcoming doubts (doubt is torture; don't listen to it)—even on choosing a restaurant in which to write. Goldberg sees writing as a practice that helps writers comprehend the value of their lives.
Automatic writing practice as taught by Natalie Goldberg, helps people to connect with their thoughts and feelings spontaneously. It is not about writing everything right, but it is about catching some images from the stream of thoughts that occupies our inner world. The inner critic is silenced so that genuine feelings and viewpoints can find their ways out. We could call this type of writing soulful, straight from the hart.
Another inspiring writer is Svetlana Alechievich a Belarusian journalist, essayist and oral historian, who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. Inspired by the Bielorussian writer Adamovitch, who invented the collective novel also called the “novel-oratorio,” or the “novel- evidence.” In fact in this type of novel people’s lived experiences are material for composing a novel. In fact, it is “about people talking about themselves” and thus it becomes an “epic chorus”. (Adamovitch).
This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher. Svetlana Alechievich
Instead of inventing, imagining as an individual writer, Alexievich strives for expressing and honoring the real lives of people.
“I’ve been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents.
The writer becomes a witness of past experience, giving voice to people who are not heard.
She seeks to show the story of humanity, not in distant big and invented novel but in the life story of ordinary people. “Today when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified, when we finally realized how mysterious and unfathomable man really is, a story of one life, or rather the documentary evidence of this story, brings us closest to reality.” -
A4 Paper. You may use coloured paper for the nice sharing effect.
Pens
Timer
Sticky notes
Flipover paperFor the Trainer. The workshop can deal with many topics and themes. You need to find a trigger word that helps people to associate in debth. So a word that has a metaphoric meaning, or has homonymes can be helpful. In the NACCS project we used the word Voice. As we work on narratives, on community development. Voice is an interesting word to associate and imagine a story and view point.
Step 1. preparation
Invite participants to the creative writing session by introducing a theme that matters to the participants, based on theory above.
I would like to invite you to a 10 minute session of freewriting. This means writing for 10 minutes in one flow. I will give you one word, one word that triggers your imagination and your own associative mind.
Provide all participants with a piece of A4 paper. It is nice to use colored A4. You let people chose the colour that fits them. For the trainer, the moment of choice of colored paper offers opportunity for small talk and building a relation with each of the participants. In this way, in a relatively short time, with the fun aspect of colored paper, the trainer may create a safe and playful environment. This is fundamental, as free writing often represents also discomfort and a feeling of incompetence.
Step 2: The assignment and trigger word
When all people have a piece of coloured paper the trainer invites participants to start the actual autonmatic writing session.
“Dear participants, Take your coloured paper and fold it in two. This will be your booklet for your story. The assignment will start with a trigger word, that helps you to enter your innerworld. It helps you to write from the heart and dive into your own intuitive, associative and imaginative mind.
Write down this word on the cover, the word that triggers your imagination, captured in words that come from your heart. The only rule is that you need to continue writing. Keep your hand moving and your pen is constantly writing. Do not scratch anything out, do not correct grammar or spelling. This exercice is about freeing the story, ideas, from within. If you do not know, or you are stuck, just continue and write that down. Follow the thread of your thoughts. Continue writing even if a little inner voice says that you cannot. Concentrate on your own line of thoughts, do not listen to side noise in the room. Do not talk to neighbours… We are about to start the exercice now.
Trainer should use a soft voice now, to help people feel comfortable and relaxed.
Close your eyes.
Check, are you sitting comfortably? Put your feet steady on the floor, to feel grounded.
Stretch your back. Relax.
Take a deep breath. Breath in… and… breath out.
This word helps you entering the wonderful inner world of your imagination and association. Mention now the Trigger Word.
You have 10 minutes. Time starts now.
The trainer puts the timer at exactly 10 minutes. Trainer can also work on his or her own story, but keeps also in mind that people actually write down a narrative and not only words.
https://padlet.com/YellowHatJack/naccs-cyprus-training-le-porte-voix-creative-writing-
10 minutes automatic writing…Step 3. After 10 minutes the alarmclock goes of Trainer says:
Time is up! Please put down your pens and pencils. If you are not ready, no problem. This is what it is.
The trainer asks permission to do a workform of sharing the written stories in smaller groups (maximum 4 persons). Each participant reads the story of one other person or if there is time enough, all read the story of others.
Participants will get two questions to work with:
1) What are the similarities and differences between te stories? Chose at least one of two interesting quotes.
2) How did you appreciate doing the exercice? How did the writing go? What about your inner critic?Step 4. Comparing the content.
Read each others story. Read one story of one group member. Write down on sticky notes what the story is about. How did the person interpret the trigger word? What type of story did they write? What interesting lines, quotes. What words/lines charactirze the text? Put findings on a flip over paper.
Discuss. What are similarities and differences in stories related to the Trigger Word? The group discusses, writes down. What are interesting lines?Step 5 Comparing the process .
-How did you cope with the writing process? Was it easy? Did you get the flow? Write down on sticky notes, what the exercice meant to you.
Discuss with others and stick your findings to a wallpaper. What are individual and collective experiences of participants?
Discuss this. In the smaller groups. And put sticky notes on a big flip over.Step 6. Common spoken word based on your stories
The little groups get a new assignment. Now that you did the analysis. Please write a new story, a scene, a poem, a spoken word text or essay together, based on your stories and write a 3 minutes spoken word. It may be poetry, spoken word, theatre scene, but also just a collective statement or manifesto.
Step 7. Perform spoken words. In plenary.
All groups perform their spoken word story. Participants are all listening. No comments are given.
Step 8. Common sensemaking and discussion
Each group tells about the similarities and differences in the stories and about the process. What can we learn from this exercice?
Sticky notes are analysed and put on a flipover. What can we make out of this story analysis? How do people relate to the common theme, triggered by a trigger word (in NACCS case; voices)?
What do we learn from personal story construction and interpretation of words and images in a spoken word?
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