Good News

After more than ten years, Miyuki Nishizawa lost interest in her career in the world of high fashion. Initially, her newspaper creations were a compensation, a retreat from an extreme consumer lifestyle and a career as a fashion designer. Finally, through art and with the help of Shozo Shimamoto, she broke the chains of a rigid life in the service of fashion industry and the banal stereotype of her social role as a woman in Japan.

Based on her experience, she knows that high fashion products share the gravity of a newspaper. They are only of interest for a short period of time and then tossed away. They become part of the garbage of modern consumerism, which seems to deliberately strive for emptiness in actuality. Hence Miyuki Nishizawa recycles fashion and a newspaper. Her artworks are made, used and they vanish as yesterday’s news.

Newspapers are full of distress, misfortune, wars, conflicts, political scandals and lousy economies. Hence Shinbun Onna, the Newspaper Woman, has since 2004 paved a newspaper “peace road” on all the markets and streets where she performs. The passers-by walk the road and don’t have time to pay attention to what’s written. A newspaper is a newspaper, an information medium and material that is highly suitable for content and design interventions. The performances of the Newspaper Woman are baroque-like spectacles. But the content of the medium as well as the means of designing and using it causes ambiguity and the inevitable social criticism that is subtly communicated by Miyuki Nishizawa.

At the City of Women Festival, Miyuki Nishizawa will hold creative workshops and a performance entitled Good News. At the children’s workshop, children and their parents will glue into a paper tunnel a giant carp – Koinobori – characteristic of the Japanese spring festival of children’s safety and happiness. Patient adults are invited to make a more sophisticated dress from local newspapers that the artist will performatively present at a public event on the last day of the Festival. (Jani Pirnat)

Organisation: City of Women; In collaboration with: Kinodvor, SEZAM.

Supported by: Dnevnik.