Storytelling

Bezalel academy has become more diverse than ever. It is formed by students of different cultures and individuals that form personalized identities. The purpose of this course is to support a cultural exchange between the different students, their histories, their language and their practices. Directing the dialogue into a fruitful discourse and eventually into small working groups that will create short video works using the images and objects they collected together. The products of this process will form a new embodiment of representation and cultural transference.

This class offers the opportunity to collect family history and folk tales from adjacent communities and cultures. The students will collect testimonies and folk tales, and present them in class, then they will join upin small work-groups. The course includes students from different departments,together they willcreate interpretations and intercultural visual representations to the collected stories. The course will also engage in critical studies of oral history and visual folklor. We will discuss the different manners of storytelling throughout history up to contemporary times of social media.

The Propagation of oral history is a lively process linking people to their past and to one another. Folklore has a function in preserving traditional identities. In a time of massive immigration and severe refugee displacement, most of all, people take their cultural identities and memories with them. Testimonies and folk tales are one of the tools to keep history alive - a tool that contains traditions that are passed on from generation to generation.

In this realm where personal and political narratives cross paths, the different stories have a role in creating memories and identities in a multicultural society such as the israeli society.