Josefa has decided to build an art project that will give visibility to the phenomenon called by some in Europe as a "migrant crisis"…
With the creator Matyas Varga, Josefa wants to prove that migration is not only a geopolitical circumstance, but also a constitutive component of our human existence, of our personal lives and of our family, national and societal history.
As free migrants, each of us surely is a descendant or ascendant of someone who has migrated and, at the same time and occasionally, each of us has been a forced migrant, in exile, in our own personal life.
The discovery of this unique, decisive and human experience incites us to envisage the creation of a platform to debate on migration: welcoming "others", migrants, means accepting a fundamental part of our human and social existence, i.e. accepting ourselves as migrants.
Whereas with the "classic" artistic approach, there is a desire to describe one or more pieces of our existence, with Josefa’s "the path of the migrant" approach, the creation of booklets (drawings that will become artistic subjects: 50 artists and 50 refugees will tell the story of their migration) is at the very heart of our human existence, a unique revelation, particularly relational, both fully human and fully social; it thus stands out from the common approach to art. It offers indeed a genuine encounter between two expressivities: the expressivity under the external influence of concrete political and historical events and the expressivity under the inner influence of a commemorative narrative.
The momentum of the visualisation then provides an abstraction to singularly narrative works and, thereby, the representation takes on a universal symbolic value that can be significantly appropriated by all. This abstraction gives in itself a "democratic" character to the "Josefa" approach because, next to the artistic language, emerges a language influenced, first, by the actual events and, secondly, by differentiated narrative traditions. This language tells, is told in, our migrations.
For further thought: "All migrants", Style and Art.
