Lous Growth
These voluntary moments of reflection will be written whenever I feel the need to write them. So it can be daily, weekly, or monthly. I don't want to pressure myself. I do see the use of it. Looking back at your process can be very useful and even fulfilling.
==== September 26, 27 and 28 ====
The first official week has past and my head is a bit overloaded (in a good way).
On Monday, we had our first official tutor moments. I spoke with Laura and David. Laura pointed out that I should start discovering more artists and artworks. Artists who fit into my artistic perspective. She gave some beautiful examples like Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Kruger, and Agnés Verda. This way, I can expand my knowledge and form my own critical voice as an artist. She looked at my work, and she found the story too far away from me as a person. It was too objective. This was fascinating to me. As a journalist, I learned to be more objective. And I like the objective part of telling a story, finding facts, and researching. But I also love the personal and subjective part of a story. How we as Europeans experience something can be different from other cultures. The only tricky thing in Journalism is that everything needs hard facts and reasoning. Many times it is based on statistics. It is good to see the difference of journalism and art. How fascinating it is to mix these disciplines. I do know that artists and journalists already work together. I would love to do more research on that. I have already done some research on that in journalism school. Time to dig that up again.
After I spoke with Laura, I talked to David. I was very open to him and told him about my complicated feelings towards journalism and art and how they can be connected and bump against each other. At that moment, I felt a little lost. And I had no idea where to start. He gave a beautiful example as a starting point for me. I was already at the finish line. David advised me to take small steps. So he shared an exercise with me that I could do in my own time. Take a still photo and have a conversation with it, discussing the colors and shapes you see. Maybe you can connect it to past journalistic productions. Maybe you can connect it to something personal, or perhaps you see something new in it. Let the image be and let it develop to new meanings. Take a step back and dive into what you see. I find this so fascinating, inspiring, and almost suiting.
I used the feedback and tools last week. I watched the short film "Women reply: Our bodies, Our sex" by Agnès Varda. I loved it. This film told me that women are women. And nothing makes them less women. No choice makes the less feminine. And that no men have the right to tell who is less woman. We don't doubt their masculinity. The woman's body should not be sexualized. The woman's body is part of being a woman, not an object.
I find it hard to have/share my opinion on artworks. I feel that I am still searching for my critical voice in art. I don't yet have one, or I am now in the process of developing one.
I also started to look for the beauty around me. And this time, capture light. The beauty of the sunlight and how it can change the environment you live in. I had a few moments these past days when the sun mesmerized me, and I captured that. For David's exercise, I wanted to use what I find beautiful. And you don't see these moments when you search for it. You see beauty whenever you are living life. And whenever you catch something beautiful or exciting, you have a choice. Leave it as it is, enjoy it in the moment or capture it. These past days I captured it, and it was terrific.
I have always been a person who captures beauty. So shooting photos with my phone is an excellent way to capture beauty. But I sometimes skip the capture part because I want to use a real camera. I don't know how to, and I never really tried it. It would be amazing to get your camera out to capture the beauty.
October 3 to 20, Thematic seminar with Res
The seminar with Res was very inspiring, and I loved every step of it.
She works most in photography and is a New York/Stockholm-based artist. Her work (in my eyes) is very contemporary and critical. Her personality and points of view shine through her work, and that makes it even stronger.
For her thematic seminar, we had to make a portrait of another student.
By picking a name out of a head, we were randomly picked. My partner for this assignment was Aitana.
The portrait was very open, and it could be anything visual.
So, the first thing that me and Aitana did was having a conversation about ourselves and our practices.
We went for a walk in Nesselande and set down for a refreshing beer on the 9th of October. We recorded our conversation, just in case it would be useful for the portrait. And in this conversation we discovered what we wanted to do for the portrait, and even beyond the portrait, as a collaboration.
We want to work from out of the world of medical imaging and discover more of the unexplored parts of our bodies.....the inside.
As it is an alienizing and unattractive point of view, for us, it is so much more than that.
The week that followed showed that our curiosity, motivation and interest in this topic led to the decision to make this idea into the EYE-film project.