Episode 12: Janine von Thuengen, Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020
Photo: Alberto Guerri
Janine von Thuengen, sculptor and performance artist
Janine’s work balances pro-active social engagement with fine art.
She creates large scale installations, miniature figurative works and socially engaging participatory cultural activism. Janine invites the participant into the present through a tactile sensitizing and slowing down, bringing the vivid unknown to our awareness using materials and space, working in a variety of mediums from traditional bronze, clay and glass; hemp, water, sound, film and plants.
Explicitly, beawarenow.eu (BAN) creates participatory art projects, raising awareness to combat sex trafficking. This includes going to vulnerable communities in Italy and abroad, performing/inviting children and adults to create part of the sculpture/s.
"...participatory art... because for me it is the most significant art form today, because I am a sculptor, because the tactile indelibly imprints in the memory of those who experience it, because it generates empathy where numbers and visual facts do not arrive, because I want to be together with the boys and close to the last girl."
Two recent works engage and redirect our attention to the environment and sustainability - WATERBANK and GROW A SCULPTURE.
Janine is based in Rome.