June 15 – 18, 2016
EYES ON GOA is a 2 volume book on the work produced by QCA students who undertook an infield intensive to Goa, India.
The book is an online printing publication and will be launched at Maud Gallery on June 15 @ 6pm, supported by an exhibition.
Eyes On Goa
Stories are us. From the simplest hello greeting to the more difficult narratives filled with political complexities and human uncertainty, stories precede and follow every event – be they the nuanced or the transformative. As lecturers we have spent privileged lives teaching others not only the craft of storytelling but also the importance of stories told. And we have come to realise that if we had to choose the one discipline that stands between humanity and barbarity it would be our ability to tell stories. For in stories lies, not only our collective civility but also our collective desire to be civil.
However, while storytelling frames us, the stories we tell often betray our nature – a nature that vacillates between the cruel and the compassionate. History is littered with atrocious acts that follow monstrous stories told by immoral storytellers. Although they seem to last a lifetime, these periods finally abate and a kind of civility and graciousness returns – if only temporarily. While we can be mislead by stories and the evil deeds of others, the desire to be better than we are can not be destroyed. Buried certainly, lost often. However it is this grace, created by the millennia of storytelling that defines human potential. Will that potential ever be achieved? Maybe not, but it is our storytelling that will ensure we keep trying. Each year as we watch a new batch of graduates walk across a stage to be awarded their testamur, we praise the commercially focused and applaud the empire-building entrepreneur. But we stand in exaltation and celebrate the idealist who, uncertain of their future, seeks to know the world and share our successes and expose our excesses. As that person walks onto the stage, we know that for a little longer, humans will continue to seek to be gracious.
Students completing studies in photojournalism, documentary practice, film, and design at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University joined with their fellow students from The One School Goa, India seeking to share the experience of storytelling. For twenty-one days these students worked together with staff from both institutions and guest lecturers Bieker Depoorter and Sarker Protick to find ways to transcend the obvious and the commonly understood. Each immersed themselves into an aspect of Goan life and, in doing so, many became invested in the life of those whose stories they sought to tell. What follows are their stories. But what follows their stories is a life of storytelling, of making a difference and of safe guarding the civility of our existence.
David Lloyd & Angela Blakely
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