Oh mon dieu

i’ve recently began to watch Friends in french, to help with my learning of the language. I’m very familiar with the dialogue in the show (sad I know) so I find that I already know what they’re saying, but simultaneously now learning the french version too.

La Fête Du Slip

I’d heard about a weekend long festival in Lausanne at the beginning of March, which featured artistic films and videos, and so I planned to check it out, however, during my search for more information I found that it was actually a festival of sexuality, and the film events that I had heard about were just a scratch on the surface! There are several venues across the city in which its held, and the one we visited at the Arsenic Theatre hosted pornography competitions, where throughout the day/night they would show screenings of several films to an audience and then we would vote at the end which film we preferred. Chelsea and I only made it in to one screening however as it was so busy! Afterwards we went to Le Bourg further up in town, which was the resident music venue for the night. It was an experience like none other, and would definitely like to go next year if possible.

International Women’s Day

My friend Jasmine, who also lives at the Auberge, was asked by someone back in her home of Argentina to photograph a women’s march in Switzerland. But, as it was highly unlikely that anything on that scale would be happening in our little town, or anywhere nearby, she resorted to the idea of taking photos of women she lives with - including me - and women on her course. She had left her trusty polaroid camera in Berlin, but luckily I had bought one and it had just been delivered that week, and lent it to her. Here is one of the photos she took with it

Nöel

I organised a secret santa for the inn, before the Masters students began to leave mid-December, and it worked! No one was left present-less. We had a party that same night all the presents were opened, welcoming anyone from the school and more, which has apparently put us in the hall of fame of successful parties in Sierre.

I paid my third visit to the MAXXX gallery to see a friend’s work - ‘Notes on Mountaintops’ by Hanne Van Dyck. There was so much magical narrative in her work, including collections of ghost stories which she’d been told about a room in her residency at the Villa Mercier in Sierre, and others. Beneath the main floor of the project space is a sort of basement, which i didn’t discover until after roughly 20 minutes was also being used for exhibiting! It was a projector displaying some fantastic imagery of the mountains, and several pairs of headphones each emitting a different style of musical sound, which when listened to gave varying feelings whilst watching the images of the mountains fade out and into each other. 

Marché de Noël Montreux 

If you want to visit the mother of all christmas markets, this is it. For me anyway, but Chelsea said it even dwarfed the Birmingham Christmas Markets which I imagine must be pretty big. We had our first taste of fondue! Albeit poured into a baguette, but this only cost 9.- whereas the traditional pot costs over 20.-. I hadn’t realised how strong the flavour of the wine is in it, but it was enjoyable.

We paid a visit to the Queen Studio Experience, which was tucked away in a casino. Despite seeing them live a couple of years ago I had never really known much about them so all the information and items displayed were very interesting. We also got a typical photo stood next to the Freddie Mercury Statue on the waterfront.

A couple of days before we broke up for christmas, there was a small meal held at the school for students involved in particular courses, and I went to check it out. Spaghetti galore! And an abundance of funky looking cakes..

Class update

I’ve been attending an InDesign class every Thursday morning for the past month or so, specifically catered for us two english folk, as the normal class is taught in French. We’ve mainly been learning about how to begin layouts for books, adding images, creating the correct guidelines, using all the tools (and learning a bit of french as we go along). Last lesson we finished making the leaflet about our chosen artist, which we have now printed as a template and must cut out.

In french class we’ve been given exercise books to help us learn at home alongside duolingo, but in class so far we’ve mainly just been learning the terms for other countries and nationalities. I’m still on a very basic understanding

For our History and Theory of video lecture on Tuesday, we’ve been given an assignment to write an analytical piece on a video/film of our choice. I think it must be art related though, I doubt something like Shrek is permissible. I chose Mark Leckey’s ‘Dream English Kid 1964 - 1999 AD’ which i’d seen earlier this year at the Liverpool Biennial. For our other classes, we must also write a piece for Philosophy based on the relation between art and history, then in our contemporary art class and history art class we will eventually be taking tests in January i think, to test our knowledge.

Some illustrations concerning my ideas. I’m planning to expand on these a lot more instead of keeping it to just simple figurative drawings.

I’ve been reading up about words which are literally untranslatable in English, and the way multilingual people perceive their ability to transfer between talking and thinking in different languages 

It’s odd, here I feel filled with so much more motivation to put myself out there and really put myself into my work, I think possibly due to the fact that i am in a way isolated by my inability to fully communicate with people, thus i must strive even harder to prove myself!

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 .

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’

Bloody Londoners (soupermarket)

Anyhow today! Was the first day of our course. Even though the whole introduction was in French I’m not that worried - of course I’m still trying to learn it and have begun to pick up on some words - butttttt it’s art. Art speaks all languages

We went to a bar after our last class at 4pm, and having been told they didn’t serve my typical spontaneous decision drink of cider - went straight for wine, not too bad a choice at 4.50 a glass (i was expecting a hell of a lot more okay) we chatted with the others for a bit, by others i mean basically the whole class had shown up to this pub, resulting in the rearrangement of several tables and chairs. They seem pretty interested about us, asking us where we are from and how long we’d be there. I managed to get two names, Julie and…. Tybbu? (It’s swiss and shakespeare inspired) Everyone is swiss apart from the 4 of us from the Inn

We went grocery shopping, and may have bought wayyyyy too much pasta…. And in between classes on our lunch break the sun finally came out!! Me and Chels wandered about the streets for a bit staring in awe at the views - I’ll post photos at some point. At the inn later the last of the masters students arrived and there was a lot of catch ups going on so after we’d been introduced and eaten tea we left them to continue, BUT an hour or so later Chrisantha (I remembered a name) came to my room and said they’d cleared out the whole inn of leftover belongings from previous students, had placed them all in the living room and invited us to scavenge, which I maybe shouldn’t have done as I’ve ended up with more clothes…. But also a new hand luggage case so it’s okay

santé!!

Bonjour

Dying for a walk but the weather is so grim. The way Lora complained about the rain made me hopeful that it’s usually a sunnier place than the one we’ve been greeted with. Everyone seems very ‘to themselves’ here, going about their own things. I’ve learnt that a few of them originate from countries which are currently rather unstable, politically, and so this quiet town hidden away in the mountains is a pretty relaxing place for them. They all seem very wise

The town itself is amazing, the architecture especially, each building is unique to any other and painted beautifully, and so from above i expect the town to look smothered with all sorts of colours. Talking about being “up there” I’ve heard of this ski resort called Crans Montana which is situated somewhere in the surrounding Alps, which I’m desperate to visit, but having to wait until classes start to see what (if any) free time I have. Also need maps. Lots of them. This is turning out to be the sort of place where often you can’t just google where the place is that you want to reach, you have to walk, get lost, keep walking, and so on. The fact that the mountains are visible everywhere you go is dreamlike, like an alien landscape.

Due to some unusual (i promise) forgetfulness I’ve left my art supplies at home, resulting in me hurriedly buying some cheap pencils and fineliners from whatever supermarket i could find. My mum has kindly decided to post me my pencil case though so hopefully my last minute purchases will last through whatever work i do until it gets here.

It’s so tempting to just do everything right away and go everywhere!

p.s We are glued to this language app which is supposed to help us learn french. Will it work? Probably not, but stay tuned. à bientôt!