Image (of Life) as Language

A mediation project and its first evaluation

The workshops of Kinji Isobe with children (こども・アート)and art have already a quite long and (in Japanese) quite well documented history. The postcard-project おわりのない絵, in English drawings without an end, is going on since 2001.  This picture shows the artist with the moto of this project ("Image of Live, いのちのイメージ) in a classroom, in the background there is the motto in Swahili Taswwira ya uhai.  

 There has been documentations of this projects, but almost all are in Japanese. In general any language has problems to document the artistic and visual aspects of art. The obvious consequence of this dilemma is to concentrate on the procedural aspects of the art production and to marginalize the sense-production of art. In this workshop it was different, because through re-descriptions (Art & Language, 506) the sense-production of art could conceptualized. In normal cases it is a problem, if several languages are involved, but especially that point was very helpful in this project, because there was not only on focus on language, but several. The big advantage in dealing with several languages is a meditated approach to sense-production via language. A bit more about the background: Kinji Isobe conducted several workshops in two elementary school in Tanzania, one was the “Shule ya Misingi na Ufundi Lusanga” in Turiani”, see pirture (in the left, below):

 In all workshops the children produced art products: they drew pictures on paper or Japan-paper (和紙, washi, the Wikipedia has an article about it), but they collectively made a paper installation. In other workshops the students should draw their "image of live", after the whole project had been explained to them, of course in Swahili. The students drew with wax crayon their personal image of live. The picture below showing a group of students showing their image of live. For the documentation all workshops were filmed and picutures were

 taken In two workshops Turiani were also worksheets used to document the picture in more depth and also give some reasons, why the children were drawing their images. The worksheet, a questionnaire in three languages, asked for the name and short description of the art product, in Swahili. The other two languages of the questionnaire were English and Japanese. Japanese was used, because the research came from Japan and the used language is Japanese. English was used to open this research internationally, which is also the reason this blog(-entry) is in English. From this questionnaire the researcher know something, about picture 17 (see above, only the number is shown). This student did draw a maize-plant (in Swahili “Hindi”) a tree, the sun and a rabbit and he was referring to Vitamin D, produced by the sun. Life is in the view of this student symbolized not by a single animal as many other students saw it, but by the interplay of different elements, a real ecological perspective. The first results show the useful of the combined approach: While art is standing for an open, self-empowering element the language element is opening a more analytical and culture-comparative perspective. This perspective is eminent at the other school project, at the Ruscentre School in Zanzibar. With not so many participants there, but the linguistic facts are especially fascinating, because the school offers a bilingual (English & Swahili) education. One of the next post will cover this situation in greater detail.    

References (more the theoretical background it in a later post or elsewhere)
Art & Language & Luhmann (1997)  
Luhmann, Niklas (2000/1997), Art as a Social System, translated from: Die Kunst der Gesellschaft by Eva M. Knodt, Stanford