Bärbel Thier-Jaspert

 

Art Therapy as Prevention

Seminar Seoul / Korea

 

The topic of today’s seminar is art therapy.

 

My topic is therapy not for patients but as prevention. Not only with regard to the health of individuals, but also to the prevention of poor social conditions and undesirable social developments. Here, we have art as therapy for the healthy - to keep them healthy and protect them against drifting into “unhealthy” social actions.

For 28 years now, I have been working with people aged between 6 and 86 years in creative design courses and seminars at different locations in Dortmund, Germany.

 

I would like to offer four examples:

 

 

Example 1.

Designing with Children Aged 6-18

 

While redesigning a public place (for example a schoolyard / skater park / interior), children give free reign to their spirit and the associated fantasies and design a part of their habitat together with artists.

This public place then becomes a part of their future life and can have therapeutic effects through its design and subsequent use.

The self-esteem is enhanced, the sense of colour, shape and space is tested, group affiliations are playfully questioned, similarities and differences of individuals acknowledged, disputes are settled together, the strengths and weaknesses of every individual are tolerated, etc.

Through these offers at schools and public meeting places, children have an influence on the design of their world, their environment, on their contemporates and thus on society.

 

Through frequent creative projects which are financially supported by the (federal German) state of North Rhine Westfalia (NRW), children have the opportunity to spend their leisure time together and to contribute their creativity to society in a small way.

 

Children use their creative potential uncensored in order to realize their ideas and visions, thereby being less susceptible to frustrations and stressful situations and less likely to fall ill.

At this point I ask myself what actually constitutes health and illness. The standardization of these values is set by society and should be strongly questioned, in my opinion.

 

At some public institutions in Dortmund, children and adolescents are involved in a parliament of the young. It calls attention to the rights of children according to the charter of human rights. Here they can appoint representatives who bring their opinions and their wishes regarding design to the attention of the public.

Children feel more comfortable in spaces they helped design, use them more frequently and often discover as a side-effect that interior and exterior design offers them an opportunity to express themselves. Instead of aggression and frustration, children and adolescents have the chance to test themselves in dance, music or design.

 

 

Example 2.

Weekend Seminar with the Managers of an Industrial Corporate Group

 

At a weekend seminar with managers of a chemical company (BASF), I designed the outer wall of a building together with the participants and another artist from Dortmund.

This was part of a project in which leading employees from different departments of the corporate group spent the weekend redesigning a square into a playground for children and teenagers. The site was located in a so-called focal point for socially disadvantaged people and was provided by a building cooperative.

 

On a Friday, Saturday and Sunday the concept was then implemented. Various equipment types for games and physical education were built up, a recovery zone was constructed and a wall of 20 x 4 meters was creatively decorated.

At this point we discovered that it only took a “spark”. It is possible to design a wall together with people who hardly knew each other beforehand, based on no more than a vague idea. We made sketches, experimented, discussed with each other, implemented our ideas and after many hours of shared work we proudly presented our result.

 

The hierarchy within the different departments of the firm dissipated; collaboration and shared action were the focal points. The team spirit was reinforced and unimagined strengths were liberated.

 

Perhaps such projects in companies provide a preventative measure against potential stress situations of the individual employees. The factor of communcation is important and releases creative potential impacting on the work. This is by all means appreciated as a way of finding creative solutions in everyday working life.

When people cannot find them, they often have a disposition to frustration, negation and depression. The sickness figures (number of work days lost due to illness) rise noticeably and many people vent their pent-up aggressions within their family.

Collaborative design can also be prevention against illness and violence.

 

 

Example 3.

Courses for elderly adults of the Altenakademie at the University of Dortmund – up to 86 years of age

 

In adult teaching you often find people who had little time to be creative during their working life but had significant creative periods during their youth.

Some of them had an intense interaction with literature, art and culture all their lives. When they now find it’s “their turn“ to be actively creative, they are astonished how much potential lies dormant in them. It is this potential that I try to encourage through my work.

 

Once this “fire” has been kindled, they engage themselves intensively to develop their own style of artistic expression. Belonging to a group of “creative” people gives them a lot of self-confidence in their new stage of life. After a long working life, family life, after overcoming an illness, the death of a partner or other intense life experiences they find the courage to engage themselves in something new.

Similarities and differences in life and lifestyles are acknowledged and other peoples’ strengths and weaknesses are tolerated.

Their own work with colours, shapes, lines and materials changes with the course of time. While at first prefabricated pictures and picture elements are employed, step by step their own “inner” images come to the surface and are channelled into creative expression.

After a basic “crafts” training almost everyone reaches their own means and style of expression.

 

The experiences made in the group are carried back into the families and thus into society and with more self-confident older people they contribute to the “recovery” of society.

Unlike in Asia, the older people and their life experiences are not honored in Europe.

At 50 years of age, one is “ready for the scrap heap” while at the same time the youth craze reigns over fashion, music, dance, art and culture.

Perhaps the self-confident older people enhance society with their courage and vigor instead of lapsing into frustration.

 

 

Example of my own work:

k.tei.lei.chen

 

With the project k.tei.lei.chen which I am presenting here in Seoul, I consciously set language and design in a spatial context.

The observer can decide the information sequence by leafing through in his own chosen way. He can devote himself to only the drawings, only the text, or both.

 

The interaction with language and images is always an encounter with myself and also an encounter with the situations which I experience in my own or in a foreign society.

While I proceed more or less rationally when interacting with type-setting on the computer, I enter a sort of “state of intoxication” when working at a drawing.

I let the pictures “flow out of me” like handwritten words. Both merge into one context in the k.tei.lei.chen installation.

 

In most cases I use my work to approach subject matters which are disconcerting to me, make me feel uneasy, relate to me historically or else evoke a feeling of happiness in me. I oscillate between all this and try to work out fragments of positions.

 

Is this not also a form of self-therapy?

 

Past and present experiences influence my work of designing with people. Consequently, I design not only my own works, but I’m also a co-designer in other projects. Additionally I try to enable people in seminars and workshops to perceive their very own perspective of the world and actively participate in designing it.

 

The boundary between art therapy and the creative design work with children, older people or other groups is fluid in my view.

 

For me, art and design involve at all times the design of the society in which I live.