The background
of my work in Noumenart

At present I am a PhD-student in cross-cultural Education and do my thesis for 50 % as a piece of art. My study-focus is on sensitive research and the space in between. I am interested in what happens in between and around and about people and their environment. My special interest is in the energy-exchanges that occur in between individual personalities within a bigger and shared space, and how that space expands or collapses depending on what each one does with the other in that space.

This interest shows in my photography, which aims to go beyond the mere expression of ‘personal’ impressions and love for life. It hopes to reach into the level of communication in which all beings share a safe and light space. Because my photographs represent ‘the thing in itself’, a notion Kant calls the ‘noumenon’ (in multiple: noumena), I give my work the title of NoumenaRT.

My work fits into the ‘discipline’ or practice of evocative narrative. Ellis & Bochner (2003) concentrate their concept of narrative on the written genre of communication. But in my perception, all communication can be characterised as narrative both as a process and a product of becoming a living being or identity. Visual media can equally be used as evocative

narrative when they aim to ‘activate subjectivity and compel emotional response; long to be used rather than analysed; to be told and retold rather than theorized and settled; to offer lessons for further conversation rather than undebatable conclusions; and to substitute the companionship of intimate detail for the loneliness of abstracted facts’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2003:217-218).

As a trained teacher in Expression & Communication, I use any medium that can function to evoke response, but I prefer to work with visual images. The idea behind my work is to be in contact between self/ other, and raise awareness of our sensitivity. My intent is for us to remember and communicate life as manifested in both structure and movement, simplicity and complexity, repulsion and attraction, light and dark, shades of colour and shape, pattern, rhythm and balance. My intent is not to merely represent beauty, but rather to stir up the self that remembers this beauty. My photographs for example evoke the experience of the flux of emotions and feelings/ sensations/ dynamics that is akin to us all as aspects of life. That experience is brought out into awareness and often into dialogue. Comments such as ‘they bring me out of myself and into a spaced in between’ and ‘I can almost taste the picture’ are typical. They also give people permission to dream again the way they used to when young and naïve.

Jose van den Akker, 26 August 2006.