treasures looking for maps
Together with systemic psychologist and researcher Rita Tojal, I started in the Lisbon area to freely make images for people that are in recovery process. We sat at a table in a public space, with a big poster behind us announcing clearly what we were doing. It is up to the person to interpret the “recovery” word, and to judge if it applies to her. One of our beliefs is that the project is also fulfilling its purpose just by letting some people know that there are those who draw freely for people in recovery processes.
The drawing is based in what the person shares with us. Both the questions we make as well as the final image have the intention to give the person another viewpoint towards the situation she is sharing.
The drawing is based in what the person shares with us. Both the questions we make as well as the final image have the intention to give the person another viewpoint towards the situation she is sharing.
These individual sessions have lasted somewhere between 10 to 60 minutes. Notwithstanding the fact that roles can invert, Rita mostly conducts the verbal conversation and I keep drawing sketches. At a given moment, I show to the person and to Rita a sketch for a final image. This sketch is debated and eventually adjusted before making the final image. Another belief of ours is that, regardless of the visual arts output, this kind of meetings has an inherently healing dimension to them. This healing dimension is only subjectively measurable, not necessarily deep and does not necessarily occur more intensively to the participants than to us.
Though it is explicitly related to what the person is sharing with us, the image is not merely illustrative neither literally interpreted. The image becomes a topic and an agent of the conversation. We have the belief that an eventual deepening in the person’s recovery is mostly triggered by her internal processes, out of which only some are conscious, rational or wilful. Therefore, our reserve regarding an exhaustive explanation of the image also serves the purpose of allowing the image to keep for the future its capacity of eventually being a mirror where the person can reinvent her/his own image and her/his relationship with life.
Advancing the gift giving dimension in the project, in one of our sessions we decided to make images for people who wanted to offer the drawing to someone else that is recovering from something. We did it inside the Baixa-Chiado subway station in Lisbon. As with all sessions so far, we did it in the context of public art event that paid us a symbolic fee and helped spreading the word about the event.
In our own words, here is what was asked of us during those 4 hours in the Subway (just the initial requests, without the extra information we requested in order to have more elements for the drawing):
In our own words, here is what was asked of us during those 4 hours in the Subway (just the initial requests, without the extra information we requested in order to have more elements for the drawing):
- Image for her mother, that has a cancer
Image for her brother that is at home with a depression, and needs strength both to undertake a necessary trip and in general to find his way again
Image for a friend that is recovering from a thumb infection
Image for her mother that is recovering from divorce, to cheer her up and allow her to read more, to go shopping and to the park
Image for his relationship with his best friend as a child – his friend has bowel cancer with stomach metastasis
Image for his ex-partner to recover from the end of their relationship
Image for the granddaughter that didn’t meet her grandfather, who was an artist and drew a lot
Image for his sister that is in Paris and needs to find motivation
Little girl whose mother was a painter and already died, asked a drawing for her father’s girlfriend, who she sees as a mother
Image for the family’s female dog, who is old know, doesn’t leave the house and has several problems
Little girl asked for a drawing for her mother that is eight months pregnant, as she is very worried with her
Image for a mother that has a myoma
Image for a biodanza friend who got hurt in her knee and whose name he doesn’t know
Image for a friend that is in a moment of spiritual opening, of changing her references
Image for a nurse friend that has leukaemia and will undergo a transplant
Image for a love story that started with a fleeting kiss given in Algés by a door with the number 43 - this love story had many important moments in the Azores islands
Image for a 22 years old friend who is in the hospital on a wheel-chair, and for whom the doctors have no diagnostic