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Martinique - the abolition of discrimination
Martinique Mural was first shown at the Kids' Guernica exhibition in Athens 2007
The canvas has been realized with a group of children and adolescents from martinique in cooperation with the Centre Culturel de Rencontre Fonds Saint-Jacques, Martinique and the the director Yvette Galot.
Director Yvette Galot, Centre Culturel de Rencontre Fonds
Saint-Jacques”, Martinique, 2007 Photo by Kostas Kartelias
and then after having been shown in Tallahassee, Florida in January 2010 in Martinique itself in July 2010
INVITATION
Le Président Jean-Claude WILLIAM
le Conseil d’Administration
du Centre Culturel de Rencontre Fonds Saint-Jacques
et
le Réseau Européen des Centres Culturels de Rencontre
ont le plaisir de vous convier à
la présentation officielle de l’oeuvre KIDS’GUERNICA réalisée en 2007
par les jeunes du quartier Saint-Jacques
avec l’artiste plasticienne italienne Savina TARSITANO
Exposition internationale Kids-Guernica des jeunes pour
promouvoir la paix dans le monde à l’occasion du 15° Anniversaire
Vendredi 02 juillet 2010 à 18h30
au Domaine de Fonds Saint-Jacques, Sainte-Marie
Savina Tarsitano with the children and youth at the opening of the exhibition
"Enough. We want to live!" Tripoli, Lebanon 2007
Kid’s-Guernica in Martinique by Savina Tarsitano, artist, in cooperation with the Director Yvette Galot of the Centre Culturel de Rencontre Fonds Saint-Jacques”, Martinique, 2007, thanks to the Odyssey Programme
ABSTRACT
Pablo Picasso painted "Guernica" in answer to Fascism, Arthur Miller wrote "The Crucible" in response to McCarthyism and Dimitri Shostakovich wrote his Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony in protest against the Nazi invasion of Russia and Stalinist totalitarianism.
NARRATIVE
In 2005 Savina Tarsitano developed in Soveria Mannelli, a small village in the Southern Italy, an artistic project entitled “Creativity in Motion” to promote social integration through art.
The project aimed to strengthen art in local community education curricula and to restore a relationships with inhabitants and their own community through an action painting. She wants to emphasize the creative potential children, adolescents have to express their worlds to a broader community through art collaborations and the importance of their concerted efforts to build relationships with the wider community.
In 2006 Savina was invited in Martinique by the Centre Culturel de Rencontre Fonds Saint-Jacques thanks to the Odyssey Programme to develop her project with the local community.
She started to work with a group of children and adolescents not integrated into the local community and not involved in the centre’s actions. Most of them didn’t come to the cultural centre and did not feel connected to the artistic activities. The main aim was to restore a relationships with young people and children and make them appropriate the building and integrate them into the community. The project brought together adolescents and children between the ages of 6 and 20. They were questioned about their memories and their views of the old distillery (what representation did they have of the monument? did they often visit it, and if so when, and on which occasion? what were their memories of it? etc.). This created links between generations and between new inhabitants and older families which had settled a long time ago in Fonds Saint-Jacques. It also helped to create bridges between past, present, and future, and to restore the relation between them and the monument, between the population and the centre. The project was successful and it was decided to continue it in 2007 in realizing a Kids’-Guernica canvas.
They entitled the painting: “The abolition of discrimination”.
Due to the previous project the adolescents and children became more communicative and self-confident. The most marginal group which did not participate in the past years was integrated into the community through the project.. The boys worked at home for some days, and then one of them came with an idea of representing peace with two hands shaking each other. One white arm, the other a black one could show the tolerance between people and thereby signal the end of injustice and discrimination. The arms should be at the centre of the canvas. Long chains were shown to be around the wrists and they had to be broken as a sign of freedom and hope for a better world. Around the arms would be the universe with all the five continents to mean peace, friendship and tolerance throughout the world. Outside of the universe is joy and friendship represented by different colours to match different civilizations. They are illustrated with four small squares all inside the hands: in white and black to recall the main drawing as the message of peace. The drawings are full of symbolism taken from their culture; at the same time, it underlines their own identity in need to be understood and not judged.
One of the final two squares represents the river, the sea, the skin and the birds, while the other is a tomb of Père Labate who came to Martinique and Fonds Saint-Jacques to educate the people and convert them to Christianity.
Thanks to the artistic language we are able to open hearts and to enter different worlds. To be part of a project means to work together, to help each other, to be tolerant, to cooperate, to exchange. We exchanged our opinions, ideas without the one or the other being superior but all persons having the same aim: to complete the canvas.
We cannot change the world or lives or destinies, but we can try to do our best to help ourselves by letting everyone express themselves freely and without fear.
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