Sorrow as art and art as therapy
Self-portrait workshops. The pain in front of the camera. Art as therapy. Two women who do not understand each other. North and South. All this and more is 'Her/Story. Women behind the camera' project, one of the approved within the EEA Grants Cultural Diversity and Cultural Exchange Programme.
07.10.2014
“Choose your most difficult emotion. Begin by faking it, then feel it and end with a silent cry. Carry out five self-portrait during this process”. The result is the human being in its full complexity. This is the work field of the Spanish artist Cristina Núñez. To channel our emotions into art… sometimes causing controversy. And this is what she has put into 'Her/Story. Women behind the camera' project, financed by the EEA Grants within the Cultural Diversity and Cultural Exchange Programme, operated by the Norwegian Embassy in Spain.
The project began as a collaboration between Cristina Núñez and the Norwegian artist Lotte Konow Lund. However, art follows its own path and the outcome goes beyond the original objective and is astonishing: Cristina Núñez interaction with three aspects of the Norwegian society. First, with the contemporary art through two videos showing a dialogue with Lotte Konow Lund; secondly, with new generations, through a students workshop in the Oslo FotoKunstkole; and finally, with women in prisons (Bredtveit in Oslo and Brians 1 in Barcelona). The exhibition of the photographs and videos has been held in Oslo, Barcelona and Madrid.
The artist asked all the participants to do the same: a self-portrait during experiencing their most difficult and extreme emotions. “Usually the result cause a feeling of rejection but I help them to find beauty in every picture because the artwork has multiplicity inside, it contains one thing and the opposite, as humans do”, explain Cristina Núñez. Regardless whether you are in prison with a painful life or your are a middle-class woman with your whole life before you, the emotions make us all the same. And photography could be a therapy to discover, understand and accept ourselves.
This is what Cristina Núñez do in the Self-Portrait Experience workshops she delivers in Spain, Italy or United States. And from now on in Norway, because the project doesn’t finish here, it goes beyond the funds and the cooperation between the artist and Norway continues, achieving one of the EEA Grants objectives: strengthening bilateral relations.