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Jeff Hemmer – Questions

Which topic turns up again and again in your artistic activities?

At the pure content level, depending on the context, my work focuses on very different topics. However, one aspect that is frequently contained concerns the interfaces and links between the individual and society. I like to deal with historical, social and socio-political issues. What is interesting for me regarding the preparation of the corresponding projects is the research and the opportunity to delve into a certain topic, while during the production phase, I am thrilled by the search for a suitable narrative. I love languages and often experience my work in analogy to learning, exploring and translating a language.

What do you seek to achieve with your arts education activities?

A picture is a picture. A whole page of such pictures becomes a style bearing an inherent logic and a language of its own. Comics can differ from each other individually just like the people drawing them. All of us tell stories every day, and most of us are capable at a motor level to draw a matchstick man. Putting these two together gives you the foundations of a comic which can touch and take along other people. I want to make experiencing that “I can draw a message via which I can enter meaningful communication” liveable.

What, in your view, is the essence of an artistic intervention in arts education?

In arts education, an artistic intervention ought to offer the participants an opportunity for a lasting experience. Ideally, it is not confined to the moment of participating but above all develops its true impact afterwards. The space which it opens and keeps open is just as important as the active, creative moment. The intervention is an impulse inviting individuals to reflexion and a more in-depth handling of an issue, as well as contributing to the individual’s development by providing a protected space enabling the encounter of joy, and sometimes also frustration, one’s own ideas and new impressions.