Nika whwd

No. 1

`Making sense of the “Ah” verse in our love songs´ is a wall work composed of drawings and printed images found in real and imagined landscapes. It metaphorically represents a story of a love affair half fantasied and half lived, through tracing reinterpreted common imagery of tropical regions and space. This is a visual continuation of a past song-writing project that resulted in a Latin pop album.

This project began with only one wall drawing in which I mixed different landscapes (emotional and spacial) of a relationship that never truly existed. As the project progressed I discovered geography that reminded me of that past heartbreak. I searched in image banks and made digital collages, which were then placed on the wall. Each of the images came from landscapes imagined while making songs.

Drawing and giving an image to a thought turned into a form of mapping my own feelings. I did this by appropriating and intervening with recognizable imagery, as a method of making a memory and a fantasy become visible.

This project has made me become interested in walls as visual diary platforms, into which I can place objects, images, text, video, and others, while researching and experimenting on a particular subject. here, walls act as platforms of study and documentation of process.

No. 2

`Inadequate logic´ is a collage of printed photography of landscapes with text, drawings, a juxtaposition of papers and different bi-dimensional materials. It reflects on the concept of inadequate ideas thought by the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, and the order and logic of the Renaissance landscapes.

The collages make their own logic, disregarding a particular tendency or structure. They are composed of found materials and text from different contexts, adressing the possible irrationality of connecting feelings and ideas, a form of experimenting on “the effect of a body on one´s body.”

After having decided to create a series of exercises on the relationship of sentiment and landscape, I became interested on experimenting, using texts and theory of landscape, cultural landscape and sentiment as if these were instructions or guides for production. Using examples in the texts and integrating my own collection of images and texts, I intend to make my own understanding of the relationship between these two ideas.

These collages will be part of a broader group of studies; since they are part of a series of exercises I have invented in order to approach sentiment and landscape. I am eager to see how these can dialogue and react to each other as a whole. I am interested in seeing patterns, contradictions and failures.

No. 3

Demos of “The sea was here” is an EP made of 5 video-songs composed in situ in the land reclamation areas of The Netherlands. These videos will show the process of composing and song writing in these landscapes, taking into account the history of the land and it´s changes.

I will research five locations of land reclamation in the Netherlands and will make fieldtrips to each on different dates. I will spend a day in each area, with a camera, a tripod, a voice recorder and an instrument. I will compose one song for these lands, reflecting on their history, the geographical aspects and whatever else I feel or think while being there.

I am in a process of understanding the influence of music in the way I materialize ideas, and exploring on the forms it can take. I am interested in coming in and out of the boarders that may delimit music from artistic practice, while at the same time integrating it as a medium of representation. I would like to use music as a form of discovering the impact of a landscape through foreign eyes and language.

This project too is part of an exploration of the relationship between landscape and sentiment. Therefore, I am interested in the communication it creates with the other exercises I am making. Besides these exercises, I am also excited to see if the demos and ideas for the songs can become a piece of music or if it works just as a video EP.