Turning river stories into the images
In contemporary cities, the art of telling stories is almost forgotten. There is a need for events, creative workshops, and other activities that would encourage people to share their stories.
Valuable knowledge about our cities is just here, we just need to set opportunities for it to become visible! Live performances are one of many forms of storytelling. Sharing stories can be encouraged in various forms. One of them is visual storytelling.
After the workshop, co-arranged by Kaunas 2022 team and Urban games and research lab “Laimikis.lt”, we have got a collection of short episodes, memories, recorded stories, and photos, which members of riverside communities have shared with us. Pretty much a diverse collection of everything concerning the activities by the river, from the past and from the future 😊
From the collected variety of stories and episodes, we have extracted shortly described situations, like “using slackline to go to the other bank of the river”, “building ancient ship for a festival of historic reconstruction”, “exploring riverside as a scientist”, “arranging plein-air by the river”, “camping by the river”, “going to the dance club on the other side of the river by boat”, etc. Now collected episodes looked like a set of ideas, what to do by the riverside. We have arranged a brief for an invited illustrator Inesa Jarkova from Kaunas, and here are the first sketches!
The challenges and opportunities that visualization brings: it takes documentary episodes into an abstract, fictional world, which in turn can provoke new insights. The illustration is less suitable for reconstructing a precise historical context but is productive for generating new ideas. Thus, detached from the historical contexts (which is a loss), illustrated episode diversify stories, i.e. action may take in various contexts, become a part of different stories.
Jekaterina Lavrinec, Laimikis.lt
Illustrations (c) Laimikis.lt, Inesa Jarkova
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