Mia/Project proposal

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Project proposal DRAFT 1 (12.9. 2019)

1. What do you want to make? And how?

• I wish to continue with the practice between photography and gestural mark making (including both 'Trace' and 'Drawing Camera')
• concretely: I propose to make a photographic series (pictures that merge photographs and drawings), possibly an installation
• to continue 'Trace' – photographic series, a typology (of marks of use, deliberate or accidental traces in public space). HOW: By making more books and explore other means of presentation (wallpaper, flooring etc.)
• to further develop the 'Drawing Camera'. HOW: By making another camera (to explore possibilities of movement integrated in the pictures); taking more pictures; trying out different means of materialisation of the photographs (on support such as textile, plexiglass, paper etc.)
• Photograms and camera-less pictures. HOW: Create in the darkroom.

3. What is your timetable?

• September&October: printing, materialising the pictures I made in the past trimester
• October&November: 2 exhibitions (to try out a couple of ideas, as prototypes)
• October: making another camera
• December: darkroom experimentation
• Then … I don’t know yet

4. Why do you want to make it?

• With my recent practice, I explore mark-making because it seems to me that there are fundamental similarities between marks we leave and I believe this kind of traces are something we all have in common. They are in fact predecessors of (visual and verbal) language and belong to the very human nature which fascinates me. I am attracted to the fundamentals of both means of image-making, photographic and gestual and I think they can be tightly related. In fact, in the early stages of photography (which is a much younger medium than drawing and painting), similarities between them were much more obvious and visible. On the one hand, photographers were trained with a painter's eye and on the other, painters would adopt photographic understanding of flattened space. The relation was thus reciprocal, sharing principles in composition, methodology, colour, understanding of space etc. With the development of (digital) photography, the latter seems to differ from hand-made gestual image-making and I wish to bring attention to the principles they share.

5. Who can help you and how?

• Tutors: analyzing, bringing another view on what the work means
• Fellow students: same
• Sonia as an experienced photographer, also interested in formal and inherent qualities of the photographic medium: by sharing the research (group readings), *practical experiences and skills (help with printing in the darkroom)
• Mathijs (guest teacher for DIY camera workshop): building another camera
• Teachers of the photography workshop (Menno and Jeroen): practical and technical matters (actual printing, building the camera etc.)

6. Relation to previous practice

• Previous practice based in drawing, painting, printmaking
• Current practice means bridging these with photography
• All share the basic concepts such as: a mark, an image, an index, a print, a gesture, surface and layering

7. Relation to a larger context

• History of photography (early-photographic processes)
• Theories of drawing (drawing in a broad sense)
• Theory of the photographic medium (V. Flusser, S. Sontag, M. Jay)
• Related practices: http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Mia/References
• e.g.: Claude Blo Ricci, Tacita Dean, Pierre Cordier, Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer, Juliana Borinski, Peter Rauch…

8. References

• TBD