Friday afternoon 24th of November 2006
(based on reports by Barbara Borgman & Noëlle van den Brand)
Speakers: Hooman Sharifi and Lotte van den Berg
Introduction:
The main question this discussion addressed was: What is community Art? What is its quality, and what are critical comments one could make about this kind of art?
In an earlier interview Anke Ottema conducted with Hooman Sharifi on 18 May 2006, she asked him what he thought of community art. He responded polemically:
‘I think that the best starting point is that I hate communities. So I would do anything possible to create dis-communities.I have no problem when people call my work community art. Of course I have to know what do they mean with it, their definition of it. And than I can argue in favour or against it. Even if people call this not art at all, I don’t care. It is your business, I don’t care, I spend very little time worrying about what people call what I do. I think, of course, that community art itself is important as a way of working. We could discuss the artistic level in it, which is much more interesting. How do you work with the community that you are involved with and why should they involve themselves in this community and do arts?
If I go and work with a community it is probably because I want to know what is in this community. What is moving, what is stuck? I would want to enter into a dialogue. Just to find out what is going on, to get new ways of thinking. I would get shocked probably by somebody, and go: “wow you think like this?” or, “this is your life?”. And hopefully my intervention will then bring a new way of thinking. I don’t mean that I want to convert them, but to make them enter some kind of dialogue. I think that in this community art way of working there is always much more dialogue than doing artwork. Even though you know that it should look like art once they get on stage.
What are you planning to do in this direction?
I am planning projects with older people. I just want to sit and talk with them for days to get them to talk about their memories and I want them to whisper it into the ear of the public, that’s it. When you are eighty you have dealt with al lot of things: war, industrial revolution, material changes in their houses. So they have a lot of visual and verbal memories that are nice to hear.
And what would be the role of medium dance?
I don’t know and I don’ t care. As long as the idea is good enough, it will communicate something. I will definitely talk about movement, about time and about type of bodies, and then, as far as I am concerned, it is already dance.
Unfortunately we are unable to reconstruct verbatim comments by the two speakers. The following is a distillation of what they said. First, they discussed the complexity of the term ‘’community”…
What is a community?
Who decides people form a community in the first place? Must it be a conscious decision to form one? And is being together in one geographical place enough to form a community? Must people agree on something ideological or resemble each other ethnically to form a community? Must everybody agree to be a member of that community? Or is an individual feeling of belonging to a group sufficient? Is a shared opinion about an issue essential to a community? Is spending time together to create shared experiences necessary to form a community? And does the kind of experience make a difference in the question of a community’s identity? Does the diversity of the members of a community make a difference? Or do people only start sensing they belong to a community when they are confronted with outsiders? And does the diversity of the members of the community then make a difference at that point? Is a community not just the same thing as a target group?
Many questions to which the two speakers did not really have concrete answers. Then they moved on to the attractions and drawbacks of community art.
During the production process, community art projects fulfill a natural, personal need of people to belong, it helps to construct a community’s identity (or to help people think about what that might be), and to bridge differences.
The process points out differences between the people in a community, but also helps to form a group at the same time.
When the artist is honest about the role the people play in the creation of this kind of art - who controls what? - it can be a fulfilling process for both parties.
During community art performance, audiences are confronted with other communities or representatives of theirs. Performances give a voice to the communities, its people and its problems. And performances can give rise to interactive communication between the community and the public.
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