Film workshop

Despite only being here for just over a month, when I heard the workshop leader’s voice (he was english!!) I felt a bit nostalgic for home. I love the diversity of this place, all variety of accents, but when you suddenly hear someone speaking in an english accent in this little town it can be quite nice.

The aim of the week was to create our own short film in groups, and me and Chelsea were paired with two other girls, Julie and Heloise. We were instructed to choose a text in light of which we would structure our filming and acting around, and somehow we ended up with Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’. Some parts of the dialogue were quite humorous and involved only one or two words from each speaker so we thought it would be fun to try reading it out in both french and english.

We were given the recording equipment and sent off to try it. I chose an acting role in the film and surprisingly found it quite fun, although i hate to watch myself back afterwards. Once we had all of our footage we set about editing it on Adobe Premiere, which gave me some handy new tech knowledge

The workshop leader himself, Redmond Entwistle, gave us a presentation of some of his own films at one point during the week, excerpts of which can be found here .

Is it the year 99?

We went to zurich !!!! Beforehand i’d made notes of a couple of art galleries i wanted to check out, which turned out to be pretty far from the part of the city we’d arrived in, so after gawking at all the make up counters in Manor (the swiss alternative to Debenhams) and looking for a Primark that didn’t exist, we headed off over the river into the north-west part of the city. All the galleries were due to close at 5, and lo and behold, we came across a market/car boot sale thing which seemed endless. Of course we had to look around….

When we eventually found the galleries they weren’t what i’d expected at all. hidden away in a towering apartment type block, we found the Eva Presenhuber on floor 2 and the Peter Kilchmann on floor 4. The work exhibited, some of which i’d seen on instagram, was as interesting and amazing as I’d hoped. Kind of like seeing a famous person in real life and realising that they are actually 3d beings with skin pores and consciousness just like the rest of us.

On the walk back from the galleries, MORE galleries just started appearing out of nowhere. BolteLang, Soon-Art, and Hauser & Wirth (which sadly had no works exhibiting but we spent a good half hour in the book shop)

To end the day we went to Hooters, who are not all just about the iconic staff outfits by the way, the food is the best. And the beer 

Here are some pieces from Michael Williams at Eva Presenhuber

And Saype artiste at Soon-Art Galerie. This guy’s work was crazy good. The steamed up window effect was obviously a main theme, along with the layering effect as if you were looking through some thick window pane.

Friend opportunity

At MAXXX for the second time! This time viewing René Pulfer’s vinyl art collection ‘Revolutions per minute’. There were some really neat pieces here

He also was displaying what I believe was a limited edition copy of a book ‘Sleepwalkers’ by Doug Aitken which I researched later and turned out to be a visual diary about a film installation of the same name, which was projected onto the exterior walls of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan. René and I tried to speak about the work, with me asking if i could purchase a copy of the book myself, and from his broken english I understood that it would cost a bomb. He said there is a ‘box’ available to buy online in which you receive a vinyl, cd and dvd along with the book, but his repeating of ‘$200 - $300′ made me doubtful that i’d ever own it.

In other news, here’s some recent work i’ve been doing, i’m still very sceptical about the actual direction of my project so i have mainly been experimenting.

Lausanne: second attempt

Not much luck. It rained all day. However we did find a cool comic book shop where i managed to find something in english, and then we stumbled upon a protest against the Dublin referrals, which i later read up about here 

‘STOP WARS NOT PEOPLE’