Co-creation
Apart from their illness, people with terminal cancer often struggle with a multitude of conflicting emotions. In the research project In Search of Stories, patients with advanced cancer and artists worked together to create a work of art through co-creation, using this process to explore questions of meaning and purpose.
Future creators
In WELLICHT, various authors explore what this kind of collaboration meant from the artists’ perspective. What did they experience, and what did they go through? What skills and knowledge did they need? What did they need to know – and what did they need to not-know? Such questions about the creative processes of contemporary artists and designers, help to educate future makers effectively and prepare them for expanding artistic practices.
First-person perspectives
Each of the authors played a different role in the project. Three of them, Falk Hübner, Nieke Koek and Marloeke van der Vlug, discuss the work they did with the patients. Their accounts offer a fascinating first-person perspective on what took place during the co-creation process.
The article of Falk Hübner is also available in English
Visual essay
Four other artists translated their process into a visual essay. Marcel Dolman, Ruud Lanfermeijer, Tjallien Walma van der Molen and Silvia Russel share their reflections on their respective processes, allowing the audience to see and experience what these involved.
The book also features double interviews with artists and mental health professionals, alongside theoretical contributions from researchers.
About the authors
Nirav Christophe is Professor of Expanding Artistic Practices. He specialises in practice-based research and creative processes, particularly in co-creative processes that has artists collaborating in non-artistic domains such as healthcare. For In Search of Stories, he developed the WELLICHT collection of stories for the patients and matched and supervised the participating artists.
Henny Dörr is a researcher at HKU and a member of the core team of the Expanding Artistic Practices professorship. Henny’s work focuses on artistic research and the design of educational and research environments. Henny contributed to In Search of Stories in a variety of roles, from different perspectives and positions, including as contributor to the WELLICHT collection of stories, matching and supervising the artists, and presenting the artworks.
Marjolijn van den Berg is Research Coordinator at HKU and a member of the core team of Expanding Artistic Practices. Within the professorship, she works as a researcher in the field of ‘writing as research, researching through writing’. As an editor, she brought the voice and perspective of an outsider to the project, using critical questions to get ever closer to the heart of In Search of Stories.
A reflection on the book by Merel Visse, artist and Associate Professor of Care Ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies:
“The stories and reflections in this book, WELLICHT, show not only the artists’ sensitivity and their ability to act as guides, but also their role as experts in materials, co-creation and reflection, and in challenging existing images and introducing new ones. Artists develop a new, dynamic, poetic-aesthetic vocabulary that speaks directly to the heart. WELLICHT has a poetic, intimate and modest atmosphere. The poetic quality of the book lies in the space it leaves for interpretation. As a reader, I feel invited to connect with the stories, reflections and dialogues, thereby discovering new meanings.
Life-affirming: that is what comes to mind after reading WELLICHT. By creating stories and artworks together, artists and participants affirm what ‘life’ is and what it can be. With illness and death close at hand, they create spaces for meaning.”
Ordering
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The article of Falk Hübner is also available in English