Shadows in Twin Cities brings together children from Jeonju (Korea) and Melbourne (Australia) in unusual conversations between each other and their city landscapes. The children meet and connect via life-sized screens. It’s unusual and candid one-on-one exchange without words (they use movement and gestures) where the children learn about each other and the city landscapes where they live.
Artist Jessica Wilson says she is drawn to the idea of using technology to open new types of dialogues and in subverting the usual notions of what that tech is capable of. “I like how this project has gifted usually-price-prohibitive technology to children to enable connection across cultures. The project has given me the means to experiment, and it has opened up so many discoveries about what is possible when you subvert technology outside of the usual paradigm.”
Wilson acknowledges it is also rare to lead a project over a number of years like this. “The relationships I have developed with Gijong (Yoo), the producers and all the interpreters is now so familiar that we understand each other sometimes without talking! ”
The project is created in collaboration with the Jeonju Cultural Foundation, supported by the Australian International Cultural Diplomacy Arts Fund, the Playking Foundation, Fed Square, the Korean Consulate in Melbourne and the Australia Korea Foundation. It sees its world premiere at ArtPlay.
Wilson explains why bringing together children from Korea and Australia has been significant for her and Gijong Yoo, “Artplay have had a long relationship with Palbok Arts Centre in Jeonju Korea. Palbok have worked hard to create opportunities for creative play for children in Korea and are always seeking opportunities to learn. There is a strong movement there around the value of play. And Artplay are world leaders in their approach to working with artists to develop new approaches to play. Then with Artplay’s producer, Jeany Lee being Korean, I think it was a natural evolution for this project to take shape and fly.”
Wilson says the project has a lovely way of using top-end digital tech to enable very grounded place-based experiences for the participating children. The team are all interested in how to create real exchanges between children who don’t speak the same language, using both live life-sized video calls, and a sharing of and interaction with the very different landscapes that surround each child.
“Over the different years and stages, we have experimented with using different creative mediums and actions to provoke non-word-based conversation. There have been video calls between kids in their own homes, in public places and in the art centres, in groups and one-on-one appointments. There have been stories made in open places and shared live via video, tracing of each other’s forms to create the shadows and then situating these in their wider city. The story-making has always involved a response to these ghost-like shadows once they are positioned in or being animated in different environments.
And now, with the public artwork as part of AsiaTopa, we are interested in how to insert images of children into the very adult-dominated-environments of our cities. Children are playful. And in the big screen video artwork we take their very open conversations with each other and face that outwards, so they are instead engaging with the city. We don’t often see artworks by and about children beyond drawings on paper. And this puts children’s experiences right into the public domain. Enormous images of children in Melbourne will face Jeonju at the same time Korean kids will face Melbourne. It’s a very exciting prospect!”
Wilson and Yoo were handpicked to be the lead artists in the work and have complemented one another in a very organic way.
“The project has been so beautifully managed by Jeany (in Melbourne) and Minjeong (in Jeonju) and it was these two who selected me and Gijong to be the lead artists,” says Wilson. “Gijong brings a very poetic sensibility to the project. He is a photographer actually and he is focused on very small things of beauty involving nature, like a piece of paper flying the wind or the texture of ink on a stone. My practice is quite different. I create concepts that frame the participation of many people in often large public outcomes. So our collaboration has been very stimulating and we have both learnt hugely from each other. I see the project is a result of our difference approaches and ways of seeing. I have been to Korea, Gijong has come here, and each time we have worked with so many different children.
We have used the same handful of interpreters across the whole project, and they have really loved the weirdness of translating poetic ideas. I have developed such close relationships with the interpreters and, even though they are so professional, they feel like collaborators now. They are often the ones speaking my words to children in Korea, so they feel like they are half of my identity on the project.”
As an artist Wilson is very interested in highlighting the perspectives of kids, particularly in the public domain. “Our cities and public spaces are designed by and for adults and so children’s experiences are often invisible. They often don’t have permission to be children. They are seen as adults-in-training rather than ever evolving humans just like we all are.
Our streets were once owned by children actually, but now they are owned by cars. I think projects like this are a very special way to safety re-position kids back into the public domain. We can really benefit from children’s perspectives on things.”
As a creative she is engaged in finding the things that kids are experts on. “I’m not so interested in asking kids to solve adult problems in adult ways (like putting them on committees), rather I love inventing creative processes and mediums that give children a voice on things that impact them – their relationships to their own adults, the way they move through their neighbourhoods, the places they don’t have access to, the ideas of appropriate behaviour that might negatively impact them.”
This four-year collaboration between participative artist Jessica Wilson and ArtPlay (Melbourne) visual artist Gijong Yoo and Jenonju Cultural Foundation (Jenoju) has enabled the discovery of a rich creative cross-cultural, cross-generational language that pushes way beyond the spoken word new friend’s form exploring their own landscape by flying their traced body in the wind.
Says Wilson, “This is a project that has matured over a long period of time. It’s deeply considered yet playful and fun. It’s also a rare opportunity to get involved in the free activity that celebrates the voices of kids and invites you to take part in the dialogue.”
February 20 – March 10