Comic scholarship

• Jury's words

  Lika Nüssli from St.Gallen graduated from Lucerne University where she studied illustration. Over the years, she has created a diverse comic oeuvre. Besides comics, she explores different forms of narrative drawing in an illustrative, installation and performative way. People know her drawings from various publications: books for young people, magazines, picture books or SJW-booklets.

  Her comic work is a constant search for a distinct way of expression in linking image and text, to create a universe in an experimental way, where personal, social and political issues play a role.

  For the comic scholarship, Lika Nüssli submitted a project with the working title «Don't Forget You». The thematic impetus is a biographical connection to her family: individuals living in a care home for people who suffer from dementia. In a mixture of things encountered and things invented, of documentary and fiction, on a real basis with imagined elements, she draws stories and portrays people. A „migration cosmos“ emerges, formed by residents and care attendants in the home.

  The topic Lika Nüssli wants to realise in her work is a serious and pressing one. She does so with a fine and light brush stroke, in a distinct, poetic visual language – for a project that gets to work with due sensitivity and subtlety, as the first sketches and work samples at hand show.

  Jury member Lorenzo Mattotti asked us whether the scholarship was actually linked to «l’obli­gation morale et pratique» - we spoke French – a moral and definite obligation to realize the submitted project. We all understood it that way: we associate the awarding of the scholarship with the hope and the wish that the project «Don't Forget You» will be realised.

  Urs Hangartner

   

• The distinct capabilities of the medium comic

  During my visits in a care home for people suffering from dementia, I started drawing the residents. They are beautiful, with amazing bodies scarred by life, crazy deformations, and the conversations are superbly absurd. In the beginning, I found it hard to stay in this environment for longer periods of time. Through drawing, I was able to be there quite naturally with my own form of creation, was able to get involved with the place. Over time, I got to know the residents and the care attendants. I started noting down the old peoples’ odd conversations – they entertain me like contemporary theatre. I realised there were various nationalities under this roof. For example, there was a table with Italians. How and why did they get to Switzerland? What did they experience? A man from Germany with an actor’s voice, a woman from Strassburg with an owl’s eyes and parchment cheeks, a farmer’s wife with an amputated leg and many more. The nursing staff are similarly international: women from various Eastern states, Asians, Swiss, an Italian, an Eritrean in the kitchen. I wonder whether he fled his country and if so, how? I also make up a Kurd because it touches me what happens in Turkey at the moment. I realise what kind of migration cosmos forms in care homes – I find it highly exciting! Different destinies encounter one other that are geographically and culturally far apart and still have a lot in common.

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