the makings in my practice

I was four when my parents enrolled me in piano classes. My fingers were so small that they could not press the keys all the way to the end. I practiced everyday for an hour or more throughout elementary school, even when I hated it. I stopped when I boarded for middle school. It was the first kind of practice I had in life.

I have called myself an artist for the past two years. And for the most part I talked about practice in its trendy, contemporary context: text-based practice, practice-based research, my practice situates in the intersection of geography, architecture, space, time, ontology and the human race. Practice became cool and abstract, cool because it was abstract, or the other way around. It did not matter much, and that was why it was dangerous.

I equated it to the projects I made, or the ideas from which I based my projects. I wrote no short of twenty proposals applying to different residencies, appropriating my practice each time to fit the parameters of the open call. I went to some of them and created things, but things were either neatly bookended or not realized at all. I felt I had to keep on going to residencies in order to keep making. Otherwise I would lose the momentum, inspiration, or, dare I use the word now, legitimacy as an artist.

Then, finally, I started a Master's program.

For the past eight months I have been making moving images. I made a documentary without knowing what documentary-making would take. I watched tutorials online about placement of the camera and checked out a field recorder to learn which buttons to push. I followed the procedure established by someone else, a school of thought, "best practices." Shooting and editing -- that was the extent I knew what filmmaking involved.

It ended up taking me a few months to make a 14-minute documentary filled with interviews and shots of unfocused faces.

Fast forward to now, which means a photobook, a zine, and another short film later, I started shooting more documentaries. With each person in my recent documentaries, I try to create a situation in which the person in it will arrive at feeling(s): of warmth, clarity, resilience. On camera I try to capture the feelings that they go through -- sadness, nostalgia, loss -- as they write, draw, walk, perform, i.e. as they conduct a certain activity.

I have repeated a directing method for making these documentaries: I schedule an individual meeting with each of my subject, listen to what they want to share with me, and decide with them what is a situation in which they feel safe to be vulnerable. I met my subjects (with the exceptions of two, who I already knew) after a performance at Garage, a gallery in Rotterdam. My act was to read a wikipedia list of neighborhood names of Brooklyn, during which I teared up. I then led the audience on a meditation about the space called home.

The meeting has been an important part of the process. While setting up the meetings with my subjects, I try to communicate efficiently (where, when, what expectations). When I meet them in person, I remain as open, honest and attentive as possible. Some of the situations I have created so far are:

take Lara to Maastunnel for the installation during Valentine's week
go stationary shopping with Mia and film her draw in a cafe
follow the casting process of Amy at the ceramic station
follow the journey of Renate from Rotterdam to the Hague, film her write a letter at James Turrell's Celestial Vault

I have filmed one of the situations by myself, but found it extremely difficult to film, record and direct all at the same time. For the two shootings that followed I recruited cinematographers (Cem and Ugo, respectively for two shootings) while I myself focused on the sound and direction. However, in order to develop a deeper understanding of cinematography, I changed this workflow again and became more involved behind the camera. For the shooting with Renate, Cem and I divided responsibilities. He shot the distant takes and the environment and I did the close-ups. As it was one of the most vulnerable stories in these situations, we had an additional meeting with Renate before the shooting, and discussed our approaches together. What we tried to establish were boundaries, safety and trust.

In cartography, the preparation of data counts more than half of the project. The line width, color and texture come after.

I have been writing this imaginary correspondence with Su, a Korean artist I met at a residency and have not contacted since the residency ended. I started writing to her from the beginning of my time at Piet Zwart, in September 2018.

For the past two and a half months I made bread at a bakery. I would get up at 6:45 in the morning and leave the house at 7:30. By 9 I would have mixed at least 20kg of dough for one kind of bread and in the middle of waiting for the autolyze to finish for the second kind. By 10 I would have folded some dough in development. Folding the dough was like tucking a child to bed -- I'd lift up the sides of the dough as if it were a blanket, stretch them and place them neatly underneath their own weight. In four hours I would start shaping the bread, first by cutting them into 1100g or 940g pieces. If it was an horeca loaf (a long one used by restaurants), I'd flatten out the dough a bit length-wise and roll it back on the short side, then cradle it with the pinky side of my palm from the side farther from my body and push the mass towards me to create tension in the surface. If it was a regular or small loaf, I'd fold the corners into the center and cradle from there. Sometimes, when the dough was very wet (because the temperature was high or because someone put it a bit more water in the mix that day), I would have to fold the corners twice.

Before I knew it I would be five in the afternoon. I would have set five timers (three to four times for each one), oiled eighteen tins, run the dishwasher on intensive wash thirty-one times, pushed three carts of 40 plus proofing baskets to the cooler, swept the floor, wiped the counter and sink and finally, changed my shoes back.

I would be tired. My calves would be swollen. My shoulders would be stiff.

I would say as I left the door: see you tomorrow.

/2/

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