This event is part of the Art and Testimony Webinar Series 2024 co-hosted by the University of Victoria’s Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project and the UBC-V Public Humanities Hub.
“Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives” is an international project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the title “Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education” (SSHRC Partnership Grant; 2022-2029).
In this webinar session, Barbara Yelin will discuss her collaborative memory work with Holocaust child survivor Emmie Arbel for ‘But I Live’ (2022) and ‘Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory’ (2023). In conversation with Charlotte Schallié, Barbara Yelin will reflect on how drawing can be used as a language to gather memories in trauma-informed storytelling. Yelin and Schallié will explore how the relationships they have formed with Emmie and with the research team guide the work and yield many insights, including the importance of emotion and subjectivity in witnessing survivor-centred testimony sharing. Yelin will begin with a reading from select pages of ‘The Colour of Memory’, grounding the conversation in Emmie’s story and the visual arts-based methodology of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) project.
Hosted by Dr. Andrea Webb, Associate Professor of Teaching, UBC Curriculum & Pedagogy.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
1:00-2:30 PM Pacific Time
Online via Zoom
Speaker Bios
Barbara Yelin is a graphic novelist and illustrator. She was born in 1977 in Munich and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Yelin has worked as a comics artist for newspapers and international anthologies, but her work largely focuses on research-based, historical, and biographical graphic novels, mainly about women. In 2014, Yelin published the award-winning graphic novel Irmina. In 2016, she was declared the ‘Best German-language Comics Artist’ at the International Comic-Salon in Erlangen. She lives and works in Munich.
Dr. Charlotte Schallié is a Professor of Germanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. Her teaching and research interests include memory studies, visual culture studies & graphic narratives, teaching and learning about the Holocaust, genocide and human rights education, community-engaged participatory research and arts-based action research. Together with Dr. Andrea Webb (UBC), she is the co-director of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project (www.visualnarratives.org), funded by a 7-year SSHRC Partnership Grant.