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Mireille Delisme, Catastrophe du 12 Janvier, 2010
Today I saw a Museum of International Folk Art show called “The Arts of Survival: Folk Expression in the Face of Disaster.” The exhibit took 4 global disasters—Hurricane Katrina, the Mt. Merapi volcano eruption, the 2010 Pakistan flood, and the earthquake in Haiti—and showed how victims made ashes into art. |
Perhaps the most powerful work was a quilt Katrina survivor Beatriz "Soco" Ocampo stitched together from mold-stained bedsheets and blankets, forming a memorial shroud for the 200,000 New Orleans residents who lost their homes. Another is the work shown above, a glass-beaded and sequined fabric mural. The show is a testament to the power of art, how it survives in even the most challenging of situations, like a flower poking its petals through a concrete sidewalk. I give mad props to those who can document a horribly painful event immediately after it’s occurred, like a primal scream carved onto canvas. When I consider my own potential response after losing all of my possessions, my home, and my loved ones, it's most likely not the desire to create museum pieces.
This dovetails with last night’s late-night foray into Japanese graffiti, which led me to a rather fascinating page on Fukushima survivors who had transformed their trauma into art such as this:
These appeared in a site advertising potassium iodide pills, http://potassiumiodidepills.info/nuclear-emergency-news/the-art-of-full-meltdown-fukushima-daiichi. (I really like the cautionary pear.)
