The Unique Value of Hand-Drawn Images to Humanitarian Visuality
The Unique Value of Hand-Drawn Images to Humanitarian Visuality
Friday, 11 July 2025: 00:00
Location: FSE013 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
Oral Presentation
This paper examines an innovative, artist-led initiative aimed at creating a safe, expressive space for survivors of environmental disasters to visually narrate their experiences in hand-drawn images. The discussion centers on the value of images produced directly by the survivors hand, in contrast to the traditional mediated representations of disaster. The hand-drawn works produced in these sessions offer intimate engagement with individual survivors' psychological and emotional states, contrasting the typical photographic representations.
This will be exemplified through an interdisciplinary collaboration between artist Joan Kelly, the Faculty of Fine Arts at Balikesir University, and the Balikesir Municipality in Türkiye. This collaboration involved a series of trauma-informed art workshops for survivors of the devastating earthquakes that struck Türkiye and Syria on February 6, 2023, which killed 45,000 people, most of whom were in Türkiye.
Central to this study is the exploration of how humanitarian visuality, created through these workshops, allows survivors to express their grief, dreams, and losses, providing a vital pathway to emotional healing. The deeply personal form of communication, gives individual survivors a voice that reaches beyond the impersonal lens of traditional photographic documentation. While digital technologies have expanded the accessibility of image-making, these hand-drawn narratives uniquely capture the complexity of survivors' experiences, offering a profound alternative to other forms of visual representation.
This will be exemplified through an interdisciplinary collaboration between artist Joan Kelly, the Faculty of Fine Arts at Balikesir University, and the Balikesir Municipality in Türkiye. This collaboration involved a series of trauma-informed art workshops for survivors of the devastating earthquakes that struck Türkiye and Syria on February 6, 2023, which killed 45,000 people, most of whom were in Türkiye.
Central to this study is the exploration of how humanitarian visuality, created through these workshops, allows survivors to express their grief, dreams, and losses, providing a vital pathway to emotional healing. The deeply personal form of communication, gives individual survivors a voice that reaches beyond the impersonal lens of traditional photographic documentation. While digital technologies have expanded the accessibility of image-making, these hand-drawn narratives uniquely capture the complexity of survivors' experiences, offering a profound alternative to other forms of visual representation.