Poetry After Auschwitz

As I was writing up a report of my time in Hungary, I found that there is poetry after Auschwitz and 9/11. Or maybe more properly, I remembered. In the face of overwhelming evil, I forgot the hope. Ever been there?

But a story kept revolving around my head, and once again, God connected the dots. It remains one of the stories I find myself telling over and over again, shaking my head. I'm mostly telling other artists, who understand the technical aspects of this challenge, but anyone would get it to some degree.

It is one of those amazing, understated ways God works, off-the-radar. I guess that's why I like it--never a fan of smoke and mirrors.

It might take a couple of posts to get it all out. (If you're just joining this blog, you might want to reread some earlier posts; if you have been following, you might want to review!)

Picture this: 6 artists from 3 cultures, with varying degrees of skill and experience (both culturally and artistically, none of us graffiti artists) were able to unite in a foreign country, receive a prophetic word from the Lord within hours of meeting, agree on a creative expression of that, design it, figure out how to execute, stage and choreograph it, then execute it improvisationally and get a fairly accurate rendering in (almost) the allotted time slot, using materials we were unfamiliar with. All done while facilitating an arts camp, in 100+ degree heat, in jet lag. In four days.

It started with this simple request: Could we do a visual presentation of a song, to be performed Friday night at our outdoor concert in the main plaza of Baja? (Length of time: 5 min.)

Answer: yes.

That 'yes' unleashed a process; I’ll give you the blow by blow in two separate posts, but let’s begin with:

Day 1: discuss concept and goal of prophetic art, do a prayer walk as a first exercise; eat dinner together to debrief and share impressions, inspiration and ideas.

Day 2: art camp begins. Continue to brainstorm ideas for the main design concept and medium to be used; see which artist(s) felt comfortable painting on stage and decide who would paint. Buy art supplies; decide on color scheme in the store, because we only have a half hour.

Sketch ideas. Test materials (Hungarian art supplies may vary from American, UK or Canadian art supplies!); do mock up, scale version, of design sketch, to then fit actual canvas (2 x 3 meters); test model; adjust design.

Since we had decided on graffiti for style, we wanted a word. What was the Hungarian word for our theme of “Brokenness is the Beauty”? Team disperses to talk with translators, kids, participants in our classes, random passers-by...

Graffiti Sightings

A few graffiti sightings on the way back from the river walk:

And the piece that set us off on the graffiti trail as we first arrived in Baja:

This little stencil, spotted by Jacob during a prayer walk, sparked an enduring conversation about graffiti: new forms emerging, the messages, and major players, including the unidentified Banksy, who has recently gained some notoriety as the producer of the indie documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop and for funding free Mondays for MOCA’s (Los Angeles) recent exhibition Art in the Streets.

This little stencil led to us deciding to do the Csodalatos graffiti wall at our Friday event, and to do it with stencils. I learned a lot, and I’ll post more about our process tomorrow, but for now, here are a few more sightings of Baja’s underground graffiti artists:

The Frantic Zone

We are now in the thick of it: music pounding, dancers twirling and popping, and artists drawing, sculpting, and collaging. If I could give you a head count I would, but it’s mostly a massive swirl of kids and teenagers coming and going, jumping classes, trying everything, with the energy we wish we had.

A couple of kids have already captured our hearts, as have the long term workers here. Everyone is in good spirits, grappling with the difficulty of the heat with wonderful grace, and flexing for all their worth.

And as usual, we’ve bit off more than we can chew. Asked to do some visuals for one song during the Friday evening concert, our initial brainstorm produced a Big Idea, which we felt was more a finale than a 5 min piece. Could we do it?

A quick consultation with the leadership team, and the decision was unanimous: yes, this was the closing piece. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

More prayer and brainstorms. And one ‘prophetic’ prayer walk—on the way home the first day from the school, we walked silently, asking God to give us divine inspiration, the word He wanted to communicate through us, to Baja, for these two weeks. I was astonished that, by the time we got home 10 min. later, we had it. (Well, we didn’t quite have it, but I knew we were close. And by the next morning, I had it.)

Another breakfast brainstorm and the vision refined. We were getting excited. Now, how to execute it?

Choosing graffiti as the medium, we sketched ideas, watched videos on You Tube for inspiration, and searched for the right theme and words. But for that, we needed divine inspiration; what was the word or words, what were the images, that would speak to these people? And how did we communicate our Big Idea visually?

The artists are in frantic mode now. I pulled three of our artists from classroom teaching and put them on the graffiti project. Measuring, making a supply list, preparing to do a mockup…break for lunch and cold showers. Return to the school, do a mock up, buy art supplies, cut stencils…break for dinner, another cold shower, and back to the school…evening debrief…24 hours to go…