In most of the most famous museums, such as the Prado in Madrid, the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, visitors are allowed to look at the paintings but not touch them. In the gallery of the 41-year-old Kenyan artist, the opposite happens. Their works use braille and you have to touch to see. The idea has opened the doors to art in Africa, a continent where 26.3 million people live under this condition, according to calculations by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“We started with a simple art project to donate the proceeds to children who needed cataract surgery. It wasn’t easy, I didn’t understand Braille myself. I made a painting with that system, but the spacing was incorrect and every centimeter more or less changed the meaning,” Benawra remembers in his studio in the Parklands neighborhood of Nairobi. She is also a neurology student at an Ivy League school, a group of the eight most prestigious universities in the United States, and combines her work as an artist with the study of the brain and optic nerves. In the future, he dreams of helping to build basic health infrastructure in northeastern Kenya, where there is not enough care for the population.
The Kenyan did not plan to dedicate herself to this art form. But when he returned to his country in 2019, after a stay in the United States, he was looking for an escape route. Around that time, a local organization approached her about doing a project for the community using Braille painting. She began to experiment and, in the process of learning this system of reading and writing for the blind, she met Winnie Ongoje, a 33-year-old woman, who lost her sight at 19. It was this woman, also an art lover, who He introduced him to all the secrets of Braille and taught him how to enjoy painting when you can’t see it. “A person who sees has something called the optic nerve. When you look at something, your nerves send messages to your brain. In my case, the message does not arrive through the optic nerve, but through the tactile nerves of the fingers. When I touch the paintings, I feel like it is heaven,” says Ongoje.
With it, Benawra understood the codes of that world. “Red means hot and blue means cold. Talking a lot, we began to create a frame of reference based on color interpretations. That is the key, talking a lot with people to move to the braille level,” he adds. The Kenyan sells her work, but does not rule out offering it for free for those who need to enjoy art.
Her projects focus on collaborative work with people with visual disabilities, who create with her from start to finish. It all starts with what she calls a “frame of reference,” where she experiments with different textures. She and Ongoje feel the canvas with their fingertips, until they feel comfortable with the sensation of roughness or softness of the different types of material. Then come the colors. On the one hand, the artist takes a piece of paper and paints different colors vertically, one on top of the other, until a texture is achieved. Next, Ongoje, on another paper, draws his interpretation of what colors come to mind after feeling the piece Benawra has made. Now, the baseline is done and then the painting begins. “We can move forward with whatever people think of, maybe they want a textured ocean,” says the artist.
Finally, Benawra paints a picture that, in a kind of labyrinth, leads the viewer to the braille messages. Each part of the canvas has different types of colored textures, with lines spaced in the details that a visually impaired person can follow while enjoying the art. The lines lead to braille messages scattered in different parts that are carefully designed to be read. The painting that EL PAÍS could see had the message “Love” in the center.
