Moscow Hosts the Black in White Silence Performance

Moscow’s Flacon Design Factory served as a venue for a major cultural interaction. Brody Neuenschwander, a calligraphy artist from Bruges and the mastermind behind the event, once again held his Black in White Silence performance.

“My fa­vor­ite tool is my brain. To be honest, I never give too much thought to what I do. I just feel it. It’s like with music, you can study the notes for hours but you will still play with your heart. Calligraphy can reveal a lot about the personality of the artist. You can tell that I am not a shy person. My letter are big, and the strokes are bold. Calligraphy is a good window into the human soul,” says Brody Neuenschwander.

Brody Neuenschwander needs only to look at one letter to be able to guess the artist’s personality. He is a calligrapher with 40 years of experience but was not always as independent. A graduate of the Courtauld Institute and the University of Roehampton (both in London), where he studied calligraphy and art history, he continued with traditional genres until he met the English film director Peter Greenaway, whose film “Prospero’s Books” changed his style forever.

“It was out first collaboration. Greenaway asked questions such as: “Can calligraphy can be charged with emotions?” While looking for the answers, I created something expressive and mesmerizing. That’s when I realized that calligraphy is an expressive art form just like painting and sculpture”, explains the artist.

“Contemporary calligraphers are stiff control freaks,” says Brody. They are afraid to break away from traditional thinking, believing that only perfectly written letters can be beautiful. The artist travels around the world teaching calligraphers that white paper can absorb any kind of emotion: happiness, fear, doubt, love.

Black in White Silence is about freedom and interaction between cultures. It has already taken place in Belgium, Germany, and Japan before arriving here in Moscow. The artist has long wished to hold it in Russia where so many scripts are present. Immersed in silence and complete darkness, calligraphers from various ethnic groups were given the task to write down Antonio Guerra’s texts in different languages.

“I specialize in Slavic scripts. I think Old Russian aesthetics is one of the most beautiful,” says Viktor Pushkaryov, a calligraphy artist.

“This is going to be the Glagolitic alphabet, the one devised by Saints Cyril and Methodius,” adds Ekaterina Barinova, another calligraphy artist.

It is almost impossible to decipher the works. This is another lesson from Brody Neuenschwander: Keep the audience intrigued so that they will not read too much or too little.

Moscow Hosts the Black in White Silence Performance

Source: tvkultura.ru