Tapping Art’s Power to Heal Wounds and Open ‘Spaces of Connectedness’
“In a creative setting there is the encounter of the self, an awakening to your own unconscious, your own experiences,” said Tammy Federman, a filmmaker whose new documentary “Memory Game” is focused on a theater troupe of Holocaust survivors in Israel run by AMCHA, an Israeli social support services organization. “But there is also an encounter of the group because one person speaks about this very traumatic experience and another person can relate to it. It gives courage to open up, share their own experience, and there’s also joy in it, there’s humor in it, there is movement and creativity.”
And while research by Brandeis University and IMPACT, a nonprofit organization that grew out of a Brandeis initiative, found that creative sector efforts that address difficult challenges “are inadequately understood, under-resourced, and/or funded,” there is a growing understanding that through art, individuals and communities — including those who “have been suppressed or repressed” — can make themselves heard.
Recognizing this, mainstream institutions and donors have, according to Tiffany Fairey, a visual sociologist at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, started taking the arts seriously as a “viable kind of soft power” peace-building tool. “The main critique of liberal peace is its neglect of people who are directly affected by conflict, the fact that communities themselves don’t get to have a say in peacebuilding policy and programing,” she said. Now, she said “people are relying on the arts for their capacity to engage communities.”
Ronen Berger, an Israeli drama therapist who will also be a panelist in Venice, said one reason the arts could be so successful in helping people deal with collective trauma was that creative practices like dance, storytelling and song go back to infancy.
“As babies, when we start our communication with the world it is through play, through voices, through songs, through rocking, which is dance,” he said. “So this way of working is very primal and very universal.”
