Good News
After more than ten years, Miyuki
Nishizawa lost interest in her career in the world of high fashion.
Initially, her newspaper creations were a compensation, a retreat from
an extreme consumer lifestyle and a career as a fashion designer.
Finally, through art and with the help of Shozo Shimamoto, she broke the
chains of a rigid life in the service of fashion industry and the banal
stereotype of her social role as a woman in Japan.
Based
on her experience, she knows that high fashion products share the
gravity of a newspaper. They are only of interest for a short period of
time and then tossed away. They become part of the garbage of modern
consumerism, which seems to deliberately strive for emptiness in
actuality. Hence Miyuki Nishizawa recycles fashion and a newspaper. Her
artworks are made, used and they vanish as yesterday’s news.
Newspapers
are full of distress, misfortune, wars, conflicts, political scandals
and lousy economies. Hence Shinbun Onna, the Newspaper Woman, has since
2004 paved a newspaper “peace road” on all the markets and streets where
she performs. The passers-by walk the road and don’t have time to pay
attention to what’s written. A newspaper is a newspaper, an information
medium and material that is highly suitable for content and design
interventions. The performances of the Newspaper Woman are baroque-like
spectacles. But the content of the medium as well as the means of
designing and using it causes ambiguity and the inevitable social
criticism that is subtly communicated by Miyuki Nishizawa.
At the City of Women Festival, Miyuki Nishizawa will hold creative workshops and a performance entitled Good News.
At the children’s workshop, children and their parents will glue into a
paper tunnel a giant carp – Koinobori – characteristic of the Japanese
spring festival of children’s safety and happiness. Patient adults are
invited to make a more sophisticated dress from local newspapers that
the artist will performatively present at a public event on the last day
of the Festival. (Jani Pirnat)
Organisation: City of Women; In collaboration with: Kinodvor, SEZAM.
Supported by: Dnevnik.
