Reactive Courage, animation, 6 mins.
2024 Ebru Timtik Award Artwork by Stefanie Wuschitz:
Reactive Courage
Stefanie Wuschitz’s words on Reactive Courage: “There are numbers, there is quantitative research, there is evidence that makes us speak up with more confidence. But to deal with emerging feelings of despair and unsettling questions that shake up core values I sometimes need more than that. Art can be a way of processing complex, dark, traumatic, content that is hard to unpack. Having lived in South East Asia as an arts-based researcher for six months now, I have gone through different stages of grief. And I still digest all the things I heard in interviews and conversations. Some of them pop up in this animation. After countless dark, vibrant and sleepless nights what gave me new courage was looking at street art in the morning. "Only the dead know the end of the war" is one of these sentences I discovered on a street wall, written in a different language. The two creatures in the last scene of my animation, with one eye each merging into a single face, are also inspired by a simple drawing someone painted on a street wall. Like street artists, it helps me a lot to express myself, because this way the restlessness decreases. I feel more safe again and have an easier time finding important allies who validate and enable each other's struggle. This way I also found the people who helped me to make this animation: Asara Panyalai, Wahyudi Tanjung Raupp, A. Semali and Surya Widodo. Thank you so much for having me create this year's Ebru Timik Award artwork.”
