Fictitious city

For the course of Pratiques de Lieu, we are continuing work on the motorway rest-stop near Martigny. The collective idea is beginning to take shape in the form of a fictional town, inhabited by the people working at or passing through this place, the experiences they may have there, etc. Temporary residents in a permanent place. As part of my contribution i decided to look up the location on instagram to see if people uploaded photos of the area. There was only a dozen or so, but I thought to add their images onto the billboards located in the car park, so that their personal experience can be shared with other visitors if desired. Here is an example

This past weekend, we had a small workshop at Movimax specifically for the residents of the Auberge, where a lady from the school office taught us how to make our own bathroom commodities, such as toothpaste, face cream, shampoo, etc. She had an enormous range of essential oils and other materials with her, all her own! The aim was to help us become more self-sustainable, and also to give an insight into what we may or may not know we are putting on our skin.

Me and Chelsea also took our first visit to Fribourg, to a tattoo convention, which we came away from sadly tattoo-less because we couldn't seem to make ourselves spend over 100.- 

Aside from this, in my own work I have begun to take a much more personal approach myself. I’m currently adding to a document of memories based around my father, and creating visual work alongside in the process. I already feel both motivated and challenged, but I hope to continue this into my year at Coventry, as I predict it to be a long project with many possibilities. Here I think it will be mainly taking place as numerous paintings and drawings, whereas back in the UK it will begin to take form in larger installations and with use of objects and photographs.

Adrenaline junkie in the making?

On Friday myself and Chelsea took the train to a little town called Gordola in the Italian canton of Switzerland. Why? Because on Saturday, we did this……….

First ever bungee jump! And not just any old jump, this famous jump from Goldeneye film. It was an exhilarating experience to say the least. 

Easter travels

Last Saturday Ash flew over to Basel where I met him and we spent a few days exploring. The airport is actually in France, but it only takes a ten minute bus journey to cross back over the border into Switzerland. Whilst there we paid a visit to the Jean Tinguely museum, where I spent a good twenty minutes looking at one piece in particular ‘Lola T. 180 - Mémorial pour Joakim B.’ which was made in dedication to his Formula 1 racing friend who was killed in a race. The piece is made from two cars and has been made to take the form of a winged altar, complete with a cow’s skull in the middle. It was simultaneously haunting and beautiful. What made this place unique was that all the pieces displayed in the museum were able to move, each piece controlled by a mechanism which the public were allowed to switch on, and watch. 

We also visited the Kunstmuseum which was divided into three separate building across the city, one of which was home to a few works by Andy Warhol. All the exhibitions forbade the use of photography but we managed to find a little loophole in the corridor of one; there was a security camera and screen up on the wall,  and funnily through the flicking of different cameras in the building you could potentially view every art piece in there without going to find it in person! Of course we did though…

The following days consisted of going to the zoo and general exploring, then back to Sierre for the rest of the week. On the Friday we took a day trip to Montreux, where a comic-con event was being held, and I attended a talk with an actor from the tv show House of Cards! On the Saturday Ash left and then my friend Danielle came to visit from the UK! My last visitor, just in time for the Easter holiday. I went to meet her in Geneva, and we spent the majority of the week sunbathing and exploring. I took her up to Crêt du Midi, where Ash and I had visited over christmas, and then we took a little detour to Sion on the train where we hiked up to the Tourbillon castle.

Collage pieces

Some pieces I have recently been working on in Movimax. I feel as though here I somehow am finding more interesting material than I would in Coventry. Possibly because the things I find here instantly come with a different aura and feeling, purely because they’re from an entirely different country which I have no previous history with. I have pieced them together with mainly aesthetic in mind but also individual narratives I associate with the images.

April fools

To begin the month, we had the workshop with Kris Vleeschouwer. The week was based around involving interactivity within our own work and we were given several presentations by various other artists invited by Kris. I had meetings with Beate Engel and Navid Tschopp to discuss my project and the theme of interactivity, and played with the idea of painting over old vinyl discs to make them unrecognisable and place them on a wine bottle stand, so that it made an alternate way to select music without knowing what it is you’ll be playing, whilst involving the relationship between music and alcohol with the wine stand. At the end of the week we were to present our ideas, but not before this delicious picnic we had outside on the terrace at school!

In other news, the photos that my housemate Jasmine took for International Women’s Day were displayed in Bolivia! Here they are being put up. My portrait is top left.

Zurich

We had a class trip to Zurich this week, visiting a few large exhibits in the Migros Museum and the Kunsthalle. There was a fascinating series of graphic illustrations in the Kunsthalle, by artist Sarnath Banerjee. They were presented in glass frames too, which is a display method that i’m currently working with! Just before arriving in Zuirch we stopped off at The Kunsthaus in Aarau, which was hosting an exhibition solely based on cinema in art, here . One work on display was an arrangement of cushions placed in front of a television, on which was being shown the original animation of The Jungle Book, and every character spoke in a different language! It's a pity it was relevant to my last project but it was still intriguing to watch. Funnily, the one english speaker was Sher Khan, the evil tiger.

As I realised this may be my last trip to Zurich, I decided to stay the night in a cheap hostel to make the most of it, and I discovered that the area closer to the lake seemed like an entirely different place to the the north of the city, which I had based my original depiction of Zurich on. 

Three weeks worth of workshops kicked off last week, beginning with video/animation artist Peter Aerschmann , then performance artist Dorothea Rust , and finally the last week Belgian artist Kris Vleeschouwer, who’s workshop is the one I have chosen to participate in.

darkroom photography

For the Indesign course, we requested if we could be shown how to use the darkroom studio in Movimax, so that any time we could just book it and use it. Since buying the polaroid camera, and re-discovering my digital Sony one, i’m trying to involve photography in my pieces more, as so far I’ve been using images that I’ve found instead of ones i’ve taken myself. My plan is to make a pinhole camera, purchase some photo paper, and see what comes out. It's been a few years since I tried this, the last time being at college before I went to university... I did some experimenting with the images in our introduction session

It’s always nice to rediscover an old skill! I hope to make use of the photography facilities when i return to coventry