Navigation
- Home
- Philosophy
- Europe
- International
- Poets
- Artists beyond Images
- Culture
- Conferences
- Newsletter
- Links
- Imprint
Murals are not walls - Speech by Takuya Kaneda in Athens 2007
I am very happy to come to Athens again and it is a great honor to attend such a meaningful symposium. I am wondering how and why I could come to Greece three times within two years. Last year in April I participated in a Kids' Guernica peace event in Crete and again in Chios this past May and now I am again here in Athens. There must be something like a magnetic power to bring me to Greece three times in such a short period. I guess this is the power of richness of Greek culture.
My first visit to Greece was in 1975, more than thirty years ago, during my college time; even now I remember very well the moment when I stood just in front of the statue of Poseidon at the National Archeological Museum of Athens. I was so impressed by the perfect form and proportion of the statue, created 2,500 years ago. Can any artist make such a wonderful master piece today? What have we created in these thousand years? Airplanes? Computers? Internet? Any contemporary artist cannot make such a beautiful sculpture.
After Greece I traveled to Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. In the Kabul Museum in Afghanistan, I was again attracted by the Gandhara statues, the beautiful harmony of Buddha's peaceful philosophy and Greek craftsmanship of sculpture, the wonderful harmony of the East and the West. Then I returned to Japan and again found Greek influence in Japanese Buddhist sculptures in the ancient temples. I noticed that the image of Hercules reached Japan as one of Buddhist deities. It means Greek culture reached Japan over 1,000 years ago, through Persia, Afghanistan, India and China. Of course, there were no airplanes or e-mails at that time. Richness of culture could spread over vast distances even in ancient times.
Culture has been influencing another culture and transforming it into a new culture. For example, Alexander the Great applied a policy of cultural fusion and it initiated the period of Hellenism. The Gandhara art flourished during the peaceful time of this Hellenistic age. Needless to say, peace is essential to enrich the quality of culture while war is always destroying cultures.
The Kids’ Guernica Children’s Peace Mural Project emphasizes dialogue among different cultures in order to foster peace consciousness amongst children and young people. The aim is to create a peaceful culture. This project was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a painting made during the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, Picasso created his masterpiece against the brutality invoked upon the town of Guernica. Kids’ Guernica is based on a very simple principle; children in different parts of the world create peace paintings on huge canvases, the same size as Picasso’s famous Guernica (7. 8 m x 3. 5 m).
This project started in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. After Picasso’s Guernica, seventy years have already passed, but the world is not free from conflict and violence and still full of terror and sorrow. Already more than 120 peace paintings have been completed in 40 different countries.
The Kids’ Guernica peace painting on a huge canvas is not exactly a mural but it might be called a movable mural. Murals are usually painted on walls, but a wall is a symbol of separation just like the Berlin Wall. However, the Kids’ Guernica movable murals, streaming in fresh air, indicate a metaphor of children’s wish to remove all separations between nations, races, religions, cultures and people.
Since I got involved in this Kids’ Guernica project, children’s imagination expressed in their peace paintings has always given me a hope for the future. Imagination is a source of all creative arts and enriches cultures. Imagination doesn’t mean merely a fancy dream but it is also to imagine others’ pain and sorrow. Imagination based on the reality can become a power to change the world.
Through the process of making peace paintings, children are thinking about the actual situation of today’s world, the truth of the world, and looking for what they have to do for the future. This is the beginning of love for other children in different places of the world. And it is also dialogue among different cultures. To observe and appreciate peace paintings created by children of different cultures is to share other children’s perception and imagination on peace. Especially, it is very important to know how children wish peace in conflict areas, such as Afghanistan.
Imagination is the same as having a dream. Art is always giving a dream to people. A pacifist is often criticized as an idealist but the world peace cannot be achieved without any dream. To realize a dream, we need creativity. Artistic creativity can embody our dream. Creativity is a power to transform an imaginative vision into a new reality. Such imagination and creativity are also required to build a peaceful world.
Kids’ Guernica is not individual art work but participating children have to work together to complete their huge peace paintings. This Kids’ Guernica project emphasizes the necessity of collaboration to change an imaginative vision into a reality. The collaboration in this project is not only ‘among children’ but also ‘between children and adults’ and ‘among different cultures.’
« The art of networking in a non hierarchical manner (2007) | Message to Gezoncourt Exhibition 2011 »