Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 129

I do think that it is only through feeling the anger and anxiety, only through a
sustained period of feeling really angry about something that you understand
what you feel in the first place. It’s that rubbing up against opposites that
allows us to define ourselves, our position. Our values are there, but we are
only able to give voice to them when we encounter the opposite.
This matters in terms of what a creative process is and defining what the
role of the artist is. By presenting a public, an audience, a society at large
with an image of something else, they can help them to arrive at their own
position.
For me, as festival director, it’s not always about chiming with or expressing
a public mood because sometimes by running counter to a public mood an
incredibly valuable dialogue happens. It’s about prodding.
I remember working with a curator called Man Rae Hsu from Taipei and he
had this really nice idea of what he called “urban acupuncture,” which was
the idea that you bring an artist into a city and when they make a piece of work
it’s like poking a needle through a nodal point. Through that puncturing of
the urban norm, you are releasing and channeling and allowing blocked up
energies to flow.
A festival is as an embrace, a holding in which people with their individual
perspectives, can come together in safety and be given the license to explore
and test their own perspectives and to move away from polar positions.
Scan here for a video of Sorcha Carey
URL: http://bit.ly/2t1kTm1
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