Visual Poetry and Body Calligraphy

Beyond Text: Visual Poetry & Body Calligraphy

Introduction

Beyond Text: Visual Poetry and Body Calligraphy is a participatory and community art proposal to beimplemented within the Deaf community in New Delhi,India. It is based on interdisciplinary arts that blend together Spanish poetry, photography, Indian singlanguage, body movement, and gesture. The aim of the art proposal is to explore disability andrepresentation through a range of different artconcepts. The goal is to explore the body as tool forlanguage and visual communication.Within this formula the project objective follows,first to act as cross-culture arts between India andSpain. Using Spanish literature and Indian singlanguage as way to explore both countries culturalreferences throught language. Secondly is to explorephotography as an alternative tool to create visualtext, moreover to experiment body, language and visualpoetry. Thridly it aims to give voice to the Deafcommunity by using art for social change by promotingthe Indian sing language, disability and Deaf culturethrough a serial of public exhibitions and awarenesscampaigns.To present the Spanish culture to the Indian Deafcommunity the proposal aim to refer to Federico GarciaLorca figure.

As a literary example of his work I willintroduce ‘Romancero Gitano’. In this, literary pieceLorca’s metaphoric language and subliminal poetryrepresents the Spanish gypsy ethnicity minority amarginal community in Spain. Through this point ofdeparture, the project aims to make a link with theIndian Deaf community and intends to awake theparticipant’s creativity and inspiration to afterwardrepresent their own community from their own point ofview and language.Through Lorca’s encouraging poetry and by usingparticipatory techniques the project aims to achievetwo main objectives: One to identify the needs, thecultural differences, and communication barriers thatDeaf community experiment. Two find new ways ofcreating messages that represent and visuallycommunicate their community points of views to thesociety. As final goal the project aims to fightagainst linguistic and cultural discriminationcelebrating therefore disability culture andpromoting the Indian sing language and theircommunication rights.

The project is the result of three collaborativebodies: Jose Abad Lorente artist, project designer,and coordinator. Khoj studios: an international artistorganization that provide artist support andprofessional directions. The Deaf Way Foundation: Whodevelop a range of social work, education, and supportto the Deaf community in India.StrategiesThe project framework is designed within a period ofsix moths. Divided in tree month’s workshops. Thedesigned activities are divided in three modes, andeach mode is framed into one month with eight workshopsessions. Facilitated twice a week, for two hourseach session. The other three moths are due to theartist work in editing and curating the finalexhibitions. (Please see chronology table below)The workshops sessions will take place at Khoj Studiosor alternatively at theThe Deaf Way activity centre. The beneficiaries ofthis project will be the in the majority the youthDeaf community in Delhi. With an approximated numberfrom ten to fifteen participants. One Indian singslanguage translator, and the artist as workshopfacilitator and project coordinator.The three workshops, each one offers a differentdiscipline to the participants as it follows: Firstly, the project aims to offer a multiculturalaspect through presenting and studying the poetry ofFederico Garcia Lorca to the young Deft Indianparticipants. The workshop will be facilitated inIndian sing language, Hindi and alternatively English. Will use already translate didactic material fromSpanish to Hindi as way to introduce the figure andwork of Lorca. Complementary it will use visualmaterial such as the movie ‘Lorca, muerte de un poeta’directed by J. A. Barden.

The aim of this mode isthat the participants started to get familiar withpoetry language and to explore the metaphor andconceptual language. The session will conclude withthe participant’s first approach to create their ownwriting poems based on representations of their ownlife experience as being part of a marginal anddiscriminated community.The second mode is based on dance movement therapytechniques as way to encourage the participants totake a journey and self-awareness of their ownbehavior, body language, and gesture. With the resultof these sessions the mode will proceed to translatethe anterior poems in sing, body movement and gesturelanguage.The third mode will commence with a basic introductionto photography and the disposables cameras (provided by Khoj) that theywill be using as tool to represent and create thefinal visual poems interpreted through bodycalligraphy – language-.The participants will be arranged in pairs or group ofthree in order to offer the opportunity to photographeach other body movements. In this sense, the projectsaim that the participants discusses and analyze thecontent of the poem together. Bringing up theircommunity issues, through their own point of view suchas representing themselves as insiders instead of someone else representing them as the ‘others’.

The result of this mode it will conclude with a serial ofpoems that aims to give voice to the Deaf communitythrough visual text.After concluding the tree modes, the project willfollow a final editing of the visual text by theartist. Departing from the artist own aesthetic pointof view the visual poems will mounted. Moreover, theartist will take care about the final presentation ofthe exhibition, design catalogue. The project willconclude as a community and collaborative art projectwith the final meta of promoting multiculturalism andsocial change through art process.

Jose Abad