Artist's Corner: Kremena Dimitrova - Blogpost 2

Follow Kremena's journey into the 50 Jewish Objects in this second blogpost.

After reading in more detail about the manuscript of Isaac ben Joseph of Corbeil’s Sefer Mitzvot Qatan (Semaq) on Manchester Digital Collections website, I discovered that an English translation of the manuscript does not exist. I do not know Hebrew, which initially was frustrating. However, instead of seeing this as an obstacle, I instead decided to generate a creative response which focuses on and celebrates the history of the manuscript and its creator, while also incorporating visual techniques used in the manuscript. Below are some of my initial visual comparisons between the textual panels of the manuscript and comics panels. 

I want to see if employing the popular media of comics and graphic narratives can give this 13 Century Jewish manuscript and its (hi)story a new 21 Century life by making the manuscript more accessible and contemporary for diverse and multicultural audiences to engage with. 

In line with my interest in the fragmentation of history, I plan to create a series of comic strips to tell the (hi)story of the manuscript. For those who are not as familiar with the media, comic strips employ a sequence of illustrations arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often episodic and sequential, with text in balloons and captions. As such, I see the comic strips acting as separate fragments which in my mind correspond to the panels and fragmented text of the manuscript. I want each individual comic strip to act and work on its own, as a separate entity, but to also contribute to the overall narrative of the rest of the comic strips, they can be read from back to front and vice versa. This idea was inspired by the fact that the manuscript is written and is read from right to left, which is the opposite to my way of writing and reading. Since I plan to generate a creative response which diverse and multicultural audiences can engage with, I decided that instead of giving a direction of reading the comic strips, I can instead give autonomy to the audience to decide which comic strip to start engaging with and which one to follow it, almost like a game.

In addition to the above, I have been thinking about the visuals in the manuscript. Even though the manuscript incorporates illuminations and illustrations, they are simply marginal and therefore not central to the topic of the manuscript. Moreover, the illuminations and illustrations do not visually interpret the text but are used for purely decorative purposes. My approach looks into giving them new life and bigger purpose by creating the comic strips in ways that marry and juxtapose words and images so that the illuminations and illustrations are not merely marginal and secondary to the text but take centre stage. They will be telling the (hi)story.