During the World Assembly, EvazéSir artists from the social collective Norulescorp helped participants to “communicate differently” by introducing them to street art and facilitating a participative fresco.
This is not the first Emmaus event for Eva and Cyril, EvazéSir artists. They had already travelled to the Indonesian Emmaus Community to share their work. They also travelled to Calais in December 2014 to make banners with migrants from the “jungle” during the march that Emmaus organized against the wall of shame. For them, coming to Jesolo went without saying. “Collaborating with Emmaus ? We share their commitment to sharing, to connections between people, and to events that are not exclusively focused on debates and speeches. We come with our buckets of paint and we try to share human experiences; it allows us to go beyond language, to communicate with anyone, bringing images and ideas that entice people to participate – we want them to work with us.”
The artists are from Paris, and they have been making street art for a long time. They travel frequently and foster collective creative practices that are accessible to everyone. In preparation for the World Assembly 2016, they collected wood doors from Emmaus Italy for a collaborative creative project during the World Assembly. “The doors are a gift that will be donated after the assembly. They will be redistributed to the Italian Emmaus Communities that we worked with during the preparations.”
Their work on the doors is filled with symbolic images that evoke a process of coming together. The fresco painted during the assembly shows a faucet pouring out a quantity of fish. It also shows people fighting for what they want – and people who are more passive, including a person sitting on a chair and observing what is happening. “This shows the passive side of the fight; someone who looks around them at the world that is moving, at the other people who are active, who are fighting for something!” Why the fish? “Because we’re close to the sea, and fish live in communities…all with the same starting point and destination, of one mind.
But the idea is also that everyone can draw their own fish, with their own personal touch. And, fish live within a territory with no borders.”
When asked about how art and creative activities in general influence social movements and ideas about changing the world, the artists were enthusiastic: “Art must be involved – it must have a message that pushes people to make progress, this is the central goal of art. The purpose of street art is to communicate with people; people approach it, they talk about it; it spurs a different kind of conversation than a conference room. Not everyone is courageous enough to speak up; this provides an alternative entry point into human life. Art builds communities.”
