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

Genève encore un fois

This past weekend was the 87th international motor show in Geneva, and so I went over on the Sunday to meet up with my uncle and two cousins who had been at the show since friday. They were expecting me to show them around, but sadly I know the airport better than i know the city, and they had actually been there more times than me! Anyway, I took them to visit MAMCO to see some art, I’d like to say that they were impressed but I think they were longing to go back and continue looking at lovely cars.

Concerning school work, for the Location Practices (Pratiques de Lieu) we took a trip to Martigny, as our collective aim for this class is to create art pieces to place within the grounds of the Marché Relais Saint-Bernard, a rest stop on the motorway outside of the city. 

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

2nd semester + reflection

My visit back home was wonderful but strange, and has helped to realise how far I much I have progressed in terms of my work ethic and other personal attributes. As i mentioned in an earlier post, being a step back from everyone here due to the language barrier, it has in fact benefitted, and not solely hindered my experience on the course here, and i’m hoping that with my new found determination to go above and beyond to achieve, I will succeed even further at Coventry when I return. This year out has also offered great inspiration concerning my dissertation - which i plan to begin researching in the summer when I return home - and also has broadened my desire to work in other mediums and experiment with new processes. I want to make full use of all facilities that are available back in Coventry, as sometimes I am restricted from doing so here due to the communication difficulty.

My studio here is excellent, as it’s so close I often spend full days there, and wish that I had spent more time at the studio I had last year. I’ll certainly be spending plenty of time there next year, and I plan to try and get the same space which was given to me last year. Because of the fact that I’ve been learning french here, it has tempted me to possibly choose it for my addvantage class as its seems like a bit of a waste to not continue, but I am still leaning towards my original choice of Creative Networking Skills.

Right now I’m also enjoying creating my work a lot more, again despite being limited sometimes as to what materials i can/cannot afford. For this next semester I’m shifting away from the topic of language and instead focusing on a narrative of objects and photos that I have found and created in my time here, and combining old and new matter together.

3 week holiday!

My week at home in wales went by in a flash. Apart from the nice 6 hour delay I had in Geneva waiting for the flight. I had to take a trip down to Coventry for the day to secure the booking of a house to live in for my final year, which was pretty nostalgic. When I flew back a week later, my mum came along with me and stayed in the Hotel Casino in Sierre for a few days. We crammed in a few places - Biel/Bienne, Zermatt, and Lucerne. She hadn’t ventured out of the UK in a good 30+ years, and I think Switzerland was a nice place to begin for her. 

The mountain peak poking through the clouds is that of the famous Matterhorn! 

The day after she left, I was off to Grindelwald for the weekend, a dazzlingly beautiful place (literally i was blinded by the snow) on Saturday me and Chelsea went up to the Jungfraujoch ‘The top of Europe’, which held a viewing point looking across the glaciers and mountains all around. On the Sunday we took a cable car up to the First mountain, at a discount, courtesy of our hotels/hostels for giving us a voucher. Up there we found a cliff walk with a horrifyingly high drop. One part even had a glass floor, if you are prone to vertigo this is not the place to visit

After being back in Sierre for all of two seconds I was then flying to Madrid to visit Ash. I was doing that thing where you fill your free time with countless activities and then when it comes to going back to normality you feel completely exhausted. Although, living here, what really is considered ‘normality’ now? Luckily Ash was quite happy to lounge about so the time there was pretty chill. We did make some time to visit some art however! A trip to the Palacio de Velázquez.

Arriving back on Friday, I am now spending the weekend resting and preparing for the start of classes on Monday.