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..

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.

Give me something to type about

I took a ride to town earlier to get some quick shopping, and there was something about this afternoon/evening that made it feel particularly magical… the way the sun sets leaving the town in shadow whilst the mountain tops gleam in the light, it has to be one of the, if not the best views i’ve ever seen.

We went to a project space called MAXXX in Sierre a couple of days ago, to hear a talk by two artists that had been working on a project and book based on sounds. We both ended up buying their book ‘Seismographic Sounds - Visions of a New World’.

I found this discarded mirror around the side of the Théâtre Les Halles, by the train tracks, and brought it back to Movimax. Will eventually be doing something with it