Monika and I are now working with the Osaka team of Atsu-san and Inaba-san to launch the Puzzle Project in Warsawa. Early days still, but the theme will be:
‘ Wise and Young’ focusing on Knowledge Transfer between generations. We need to create a community of skills and wisdom, shared by , and between older and younger generations in order to create a new, viable consciousness for the new decade.
2004 I met Atsu-san and Inaba-san in Osaka. These two wonderful peopple had started the puzzleproject, which is a continous, collaborative endevaour. I was intrigued and decided to bring it- somehow to London. 2008 it was made possible, with a superb team of MA students, espacially Beatriz and Sasha who I taught at London Metropolitan University, as well as Sean ( LCC student) and Chantal. It turned out to be a positive experience, and something to build on.
The text on Brent’s council’s website reads as follows
Puzzle Project UK
‘The artists involved in the Puzzle Project represent a fresh new initiative that originated from Osaka, Japan. The project explores and experiments with the interplay of image and text. Each of the artists articulates a word, which they associate to the project or to their own individual work. The pieces show connections and disconnections whilst simultaneously continuing to belong to one single puzzle piece. The project by nature is meant to reflect the way in which people interact in urban centres, where boundaries between strangers and friends blur and we build a new city and our own personal narratives.
The completed Puzzle is a large-scale artwork, made up of 120 individual smaller pieces from each artist. It is based on the original Japanese concept of sixty artists creating their own puzzle pieces, whilst being unaware of the contents of the other participants’ work. The UK project involves artists from Japan, the UK, Sweden, Mexico, Hungary and other countries. Members of the local community have also created their own puzzle pieces which will be part of the final artwork. Funded by Awards for All, Brent Council and Brent Artists Resource and curated by Beatriz Hernandez and Lorenzo Belenguer’
For more information, See www.puzzleprojectuk
Text from: com www.brentartistsresource.org.uk
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