Louisa Term 2.1

https://kirstindemer.com/portfolio

http://mycelium-tectonics.com/

Tomás Saraceno spins a ‘cosmic’ spiderweb inside Paris’ Palais de Tokyo

Elliott Hundley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9MOxTnrB7M

"I see the world as very complicated and overwhelming and I want to see images that manifest that, unseen, layered, simultaneous, overwhelming way that I actually perceive reality."

Why "I"?
The world is so complicated and overwhelming. It fascinates me into eternity.
The world is so complicated and overwhelming. It strikes me -

Why overwhelming?
Is the world overwhelming? Or am I overwhelmed?
I think the right way of saying it is:
The world is so complex and interconnected. It is as much overwhelming to me as it is immensely fascinating.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Lola

http://www.madeleineberkhemer.com/?cat=3
Madeleine Berkhemer

My previous piece was about what it feels like to have difficult conversations.

I want to elaborate on this topic in all directions.
I think the word that sums up best what I want this to be about is connectedness. I find it so intensely fascinating how everything is connected and how the things that work in the world work because they are interconnected and interdependent.

Being cut off means being lonely. At least to me.
Living without nature makes you feel like a stranger to the world that isn't fabricated by humans.
Being in a city without being able to see the stars makes me forget about the bigger scope of things.

While everything in our world seems to become more connected, some connections that are the most important are getting lost. Feelings of loneliness are so common among too many people, and the consequences of the disconnections of society from the biosphere are becoming as clear as ever.

I made a tree out of metal.

At Juans class at Mariannas place I had a very long conversation with Amand and Pleuntje about our projects.

It gave me a bit of crisis, but it was good to have to explain what we are up to and what our work is about.

It made me realize, that, as always, my topic is way too broad, and that I need to specify what I am doing.

These are the notes I took. They don't really reflect my thought process, but the class was important for the further development of my project so here they are.

Conclusion:
I will come back to Paul's initial assignment: Reenactment, taking something over from the outside and making it ours.

In the film the wall is covered in pressed flowers.
I am making abstract flower-like beings to cover the walls.

This is a link to the movie of which I want to reenact one scene. The scene starts at 20:33 and goes until 22:30.

this is the link to the youtube video in case the thing on the left doesn't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEIfplmJ0J4&t=2650s

the dichotomy of good and bad, right and wrong
why do people believe in certain things?
Do some opinions make people inherently bad?
What is evil? Is there true evil without any good?

Sketching out the script

Getting started on making the set

the set is slowly coming together. It took me so long to get all of the things to the studio, and this is not even everything.

this is my interpretation of the set, finished. In the shots I just switched around the tree with the little stool.

For reference, this is what the original set looked like.

The last few weeks have been very intense for me. Our landlord informed us without any prior warning that we are being kicked out of our apartment, so I have been trying to keep up with my work at WdKA and EUC with the little monster that the housing market is sitting in my neck.
Last week we occupied the Erasmus University and got kicked out by the riot police. I expected the stress to be over after the action, but with news coverage in national media we have a ton of attention and a ton of work that comes with it.
I'm running at full speed and it is extremely exhausting. I'm writing this one here because I didn't have the chance to say it in class.

I did the shooting last weekend, and now I am working on editing everything and making the soundtrack. Don't really know how I can share that on here, but I'll save some in between stages of the editing.

answering my own questions to myself

Why did I choose this film?
Why did I include the fable?
What is the work about?
What did I add in my re-enactment of this scene?
Why this scene?
What is the work about?

Previously on this page I tried to express the not yet matured idea of the concept of this film.
There was something about the dichotomy of good and bad and lots of questions. Why do people believe in certain things? Do some opinions make people inherently bad? What is evil? Is there true evil without any good?
In the first work I made in this term I wanted to express how it feels to speak to someone who thinks so differently from oneself and has such opposing opinions that it makes you feel like you will never be able to understand each other, let alone have a constructive conversation.
I often feel this way when I speak to very conservative people about queerness, especially because as a queer person, it is especially upsetting when people express homophobic views. I interviewed other queer people on this and used the audio material for the first work I made this term.
With this I expressed a layer of the problem that I am interested in, the layer that concerns myself and other queer people and allies.
But there was another layer that I couldn't stop thinking about. In the work that I made, there is the presence of an anonymous other, an other who is a source of pain. Through this, it is somehow implied that this other is ignorant and bad. This dichotomy kept bothering me. Isn't the world a lot more complicated than us and them? Only five years ago, I could have been this other. Five years ago, I didn't know I was queer, and my opinions and knowledge about queerness was solely informed by what I had been fed by my homogenously straight and homophobic environment.
This sort of sums up my starting point for this term, apart from the fact that six weeks ago I was far from able to express this in words. Instead, these thoughts resided in me in the form of a turmoil of impressions that hadn't taken any form yet. Maybe this explains the notes I wrote under the "Concept" bars, that were attempts to grasp this turmoil and put it into words. I think you can also see that in the artistic research I did and the first ideas I had.
So essentially, what I was interested in is how people come to believe in the things they believe in, and how they develop a perception of what is good and what is bad.
In order to explore this topic, I went back to myself, more specifically to my own childhood. In childhood, most things are quite black and white, good and bad, and they become more complicated and colourful as you get older. For some reason, my mind sprang to these stories that we used to read in primary school, that, I suppose, were meant to teach us moral lessons. The stories were called Fabeln (I think it is fables in English). The characters were always animals, and they are always supposed illustrate some moral principle.
I decided that I wanted to have one if these stories in my work, so I did some research and the story of the eagle and the fox stuck to me, mainly because it is such a terrible story and from the moment I read it I was wondering what moral lesson could be drawn from it, especially because it was supposed to be about how it is important to be sincere in your friendships.
So back to my starting point for this term: I had a vague idea and a terrible fable I that I couldn't stop thinking about. And two more things I hadn't mentioned yet:
A studio space in Ijzerblok that I only have until December, so I wanted to make the most use of it that I possibly could, and a very strong determination that I wanted to use video as a medium, because it is a medium that I find extremely intimidating, but very fascinating.

My conclusion was that I will build a set in my studio, thereby will have to make use of the stations, and then make the video there.

Once that was decided I was suddenly faced with having to answer the specifics: what exactly am I going to do? (That was when we had the class with Juan at Marianas.) In order to answer this question, I did what I normally do when I don't know what to do in a project. I flung myself into even more artistic research. The answer came quicker than I expected when I remembered one of my favourite movies: Daisies from 1966 by Vera Chytilová.
In the film, the two main characters, the Maries, realize that the world is rotten and spoiled, so they conclude that they might as well be spoiled too. They engage in all kinds of morally "rotten" behaviour, they waste food, exploit other people, wilfully destroy things and do whatever gives them the most pleasure. But throughout the whole film, the viewer never really sees them in a bad light, the film is too joyful and beautiful for that. That is why I thought the film was perfect, it is sort of an antithesis to the fables, but conveys a much more sophisticated message. On top of that, it is very hard to exactly point ones finger on what the film is about. It is feminist, it is a critique of the bourgeoisie, it is so many things.

This leaves only to more things to answer: why this scene, and what did i add to the scene?
I chose this scene because I wanted to use a scene that happened in their room, because I wanted to use their room as the example for the set I was building. I liked this scene because of the playfulness with which the serious topics life and death are mentioned, which are very important key themes and motives in the fable, but in daisies, there are not even worth a proper conversation. In the beginning Marie 1 tries to kill herself with gas but forgets to close the window. After a short conversation they are both sitting on the bed and the phone rings, and Marie 1 picks up and says "die, die, die!".
What I added to the scene is the fable, that contrasts daisies and amplifies the theme of what is good and what is bad, as well as my interpretation of the set.