(March 2019)
Creative workshop on painting with light, eight people, five techniques (creating coloured shadows; building compositions by shadow silhouettes; projecting images on human bodies – human canvases; recording drawing with light sources during long expositions; body designs by luminescent paints visible in ultraviolet light). Duration ca. 6 hours.
The workshop was performed as part of the Dotyk Krásy (Touch of Beauty) event on art and religion in Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia.
The workshop's theme followed the overall theme "crack”, which references Pierre Claverie's theology of interfaith and intercultural dialogue. Claverie was a Catholic bishop working in Algeria. His frequent interventions for social justice and peace promotion led to his assassination in 1996. His innovative approach to dialogue was to put himself into the "crack" between two societies, two realms (reality and ideal). He disagreed with artificial attempts at creating "seams" to connect different traditions because the seam can connect but simultaneously open numerous new small cracks. Claverie recognised Jesus as the one who stands in the crack, a word which he used to express any kind of division or separation.
The participants worked with the theme of Pierre Claverie's innovative theological idea of filling the gap between two cultures through the living friendship of concrete people instead of an artificial seam of formal dialogues and contracts. During the painting workshop, people became both authors and artefacts canvases on which participants painted in the literal and figurative sense of the word. The idea of personal involvement was the primary message. The technique communicated clearly that personal responsibility for the process is crucial because the rendered visual dialogue was visible and tangible only when participants offered their own bodies and energy.