Description
Memories of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami and Its Aftermath
Right after the Tsunami on 26 December 2024, Veronik Menanteau spent time with the orphan victims of the disaster in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu. It was an intense experience to see how much the children are in the capacity for resilience, to express the loss of their parent in the big wave through painting.
Now, 21 years later, this book remembers those days through her poems, featuring the paintings created by the children who had lost everything to the tragedy.
Veronik Menanteau is a French contemporary visual artist enrolled in Beaux Art School of Paris, involved in different international art projects, a writer and poet. She considers herself as an explorer, comparing her sense of discovering the deep meaning of creating to the artist that carried the light in the prehistorical cave of Lascaux. She asks the question: What was the reaction of the people looking for the first time ever to abstract representation of their world? This question is the key to her work. In 1995, she was the first French artist to connect to the internet. She created the first French artist web site FranceArtist. After this complete immersion into the web, she decided, in 1998, to work outdoors, in Situ, and started doing Art in Nature. She created pieces of Land Art in France, Austria, Cameroon, India, Vietnam, and California. In this interaction with people, she kept exploring what she called le geste premier, in other word, from where comes this tremendous pulse of expressing the self. Pioneering the use of art with cognition tools, she created a NGO, Art As First Aid Energy, providing art-healing workshops, a unique series of exercises dedicated to inspiring and waking up the life of imagination and keeping alive intuition for vulnerable children in Vietnam and Cambodia, where she developed the first creativity workshops for street children and children with HIV. She worked in India with children traumatised by the Tsunami and taught her methods to local social workers. To provide funds for her NGO, she sells her artistic work in galleries in Paris.
