TOUCH Experiences in Copenhagen - I: the workshops

Workshop 1 – digging into blindness and art

The first workshop took place in April 2011, at the Institute for the Blind and sight impaired (IBOS) just outside of Copenhagen. Apart from our 3 recruited participants, there were also 3 participants that were taking part in an art class at the institute. Visual artist Nikolai Troest, project leader Oleg Koefoed, and project co-worker Kajsa Paludan were also present from Cultura21. The workshop lasted for about 3 hours.

The agenda for this workshop was to get a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of working with visual and tactile art with blind and sight impaired people. Before the workshop, we had conversations both with some of the people working at the institute, especially those working either with art or with communication, as well as with a psychologist with many years of experience with working with blind and sight impaired people. Our ambition was to let the conversation be guided by the artistic approach of a visual artist, Nikolai, and the approach to art, visual or other, of blind people with experience with art, but not working as professional artists.

Our participants had a very varied degree of experience with art – one of them was even a visual artist herself (techically blind=less than 6/60 vision, but with ”tunnel sight” allowing her to see the colours that she uses). Another participant expressed strong feelings, but mostly of inhibition and fear related to both the use and the creation of art that somehow challenges her (lost) vision (she lost her sight at the age of 12 and is 27 today).

The observations from the workshop were the following: all participants had a quite strong sense of spatial intuition, but only some of them use this in other aspects of contact with materials; for instance when working with what they understand as art, our participants tended to rely much more on their direct material experience – making it hard to use imagination or intuition as the base for creative exercises (we decided to test this further to see how big the problem would be); all participants enjoyed art of varying kinds, from music to literature, sculpture, and some quantity of visually expressed art (but of course this was what motivated them to be present); the experience of art was important for all of them to feel the more aesthetic qualities of life, and gave them ways of sensing and sharing with friends, family of even readers (a participant had written a novel and is working on the second one) – but only one participant was actually creating art for herself; the participants in the art class expressed very austere relations to their work – they saw it more as a way to make objects, than as an aesthetic experience with its own qualities (they did not relate at all to the aesthetic qualities of the cloth when they were weaving, for instance, although they did refer to an ability to feel the difference between different cloth colours); all participants seemed open to going through a more direct challenge in terms of feeling and creating works of art (or something artistically inspired); for the visual artist, learning about the way the blind / sight impaired led especially to a strong reaction towards their spatial abilites when moving through a room, and how this was done based on a strong degree of intuition.

Workshop 2 – testing the concept

For the second workshop at the end of April in Copenhagen, we invited 5 blind / highly sight impaired participants to come to the Project House on Enghavevej for a 4-hour workshop, to test the ideas we wanted to use for the lab.

The 5 participants were a mix of male and female, young and older (27 to 62), and experienced in working with art to nto at all experienced. All participants were asked to go through a series of exercises based on sense experiences: smell, hearing, movement, touching of objects – and to express their thoughts and emotions on a canvas between every one of the 4 exercises. This part of the workshop lasted for about 2 1⁄2 hours, followed by a discussion over a light meal. We observed the participants closely and also asked them about how they saw the workshop and its effect upon them.

The experience was clearly very different for the different participants, and their ability to express themselves was also of very varied quality. Mainly, it became clear that the exercises relied very much on openness in the receptive part of the session, and intuition in the creative part (or on intuition going through from reception to creation). Thus, the more inhibited participants with less self-confidence found it very hard to accept the associative parts of the exercise, and equally hard to express their feelings in the painting part. We had deliberately chosen not to let them work with other tactililty-based expressive tools than colours on canvas, as we wanted to test this idea. Being pretty confident that other tactile tools such as clay, sculptural paint (oil rather than acryllic paint), wood, etc, would work out for blind/sight impaired, we tested the concept to the limit. And the conclusion that we have drawn is that the approach is simply too selective or exclusive. So we suggest using a combination of colours and other materials, still on canvas, but in a way that makes it possible to a larger extent for the participant to feel/touch the work that they create. For instance, they will be able to make ”lines” across the canvas with wood or clay, and then fill out the spaces with colours if they feel confident enough about it. The conclusion from this workshop is that the idea behind the lab is feasible, but must be carried out with great sensitivity.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to IBOS, Institut for Blinde og Svagtseende for help with developing the workshops, with communication and for hosting the first workshop. Thank you to Dansk Blinde Samfund for help with recruiting participants and proomting the project. Thank you to Mogens Bang, retired professor in psychology, for discussions and assistance regarding the haptic sense and the workshops. Thank you of course to all the participants, who make it possible for us to gain an insight into the world of the blind, and for accepting to play our strange games with us. And thank you to the team, which consisted of the following people:

Oleg Koefoed – Project and workshop leader // Nikolai Troest – visual artist //Kajsa Li Paludan – Project and workshop co-worker // Helle Ansholm Rasmussen – Project and workshop co-worker

// Karsten Tadie – Project and workshop co-worker //Mette Skau Smølz – Workshop co-worker