Honey's Wall

The guidebook recommended Chantal Akerman's 'Portrait d'une Paresseuse' and 'La Chambre', but I felt more connected to 'Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'.
Martha Rosler's 'Semiotics of the Kitchen' (also in the guidebook) reminded me immediately of Jeanne Dielman. Both were released in 1975.

"I want the spectator to have a physical experience, for him or her to feel time. Films are generally made to literally and metaphorically pass the time. But I want you to experience the time of a character." - Chantal Akerman interviewed by Chris Dercon, 1995

Perhaps for the first time in a while for a lot of people during quarantine, they are in a situation where they are forced to experience time passing through their bodies, without much choice of possible distractions.

Relating to this practice -> watch from 2:47

I talked to my best friend for more than an hour on the phone. She lives away from home, in a city with a relatively low rate of COVID-19 cases but currently under the danger of an erupting volcano.
She worries for her mother and extended family, who live closer to the virus epicenter but further from any active volcanoes.

She's an only child so her mother is currently living alone. We talked about the social and cultural pressures coming from multiple sides that make it difficult for Indonesian children living away to make a decision (and how decision-making for us never only concern the individual anyway) : to come home or to stay?

I doodled and wrote as we were on call, something I already do when on calls to keep my hands occupied.

DESIGNS FOR THE PLURIVERSE

A moment away from the screen. No glue or tape lying around, paper fitted in the crevices of my parents' vanity.

Question(s) and prompts relating to the text :

1. What is the best way to put nurture and care in the forefront of social art projects, 'setting aside' the need to shock or provoke? (In quotation marks because these two aspects are also vital in catalyzing change)

4 : Bridging the Distance

ONE : NATURAL FORMS OF CIRCULATION AND COMMUNICATION

- The way animals adapt their skin and furs to their surroundings to better hide from predators. Disappearing is also a way of communicating. (Human implementation : underground movements where members are dispatched ‘above ground’, camouflaging as regular members of society or members of the ruling class). There was a question I saw on twitter that I found really interesting : how many more years will it take for animals to start evolving camouflage based on man-made materials? And if so what materials would it be? (Concrete, steel, etc.)

- Cats have evolved the way they use their meows. The way they ‘speak’ to fellow cats is different from the way they meow at humans. They rarely meow at other cats, and if they do their voices are low and sound more like a grumble, the high-pitched meows are exclusively used to humans as it’s the sound kittens make to get their mother’s attention and receive care. (Human implementation : code-switching when in different social groups or communities)

- Fungal network : trees secretly ‘talking' to each other in the forrest through exchanging information in the form of carbon and nutrients through an underground fungal network. For example when one plant is attacked by pests or other external disturbances, they send signals to neighboring plants so they can start their defense mechanisms accordingly. Or when one plant doesn't get enough sunlight to properly accomplish photosynthesis, other plants will provide them with extra sugar that they transfer via the network.

TWO : EXAMPLES OF WORKAROUNDS

- Squid scientist who’s communicating with their neighborhood via writing with chalk on the shared pavement.

THREE : INVENT A PERFORMATIVE ACTION

5 : Going Public vs Going Underground

- Higher exposure of their message to the general public.
- More easily dismantled by authorities.
- Inaccessible to those living in conditions that are unsafe for them to publicly advocate the cause.

- Limits access as some people simply do not have the connections to be able to be exposed to the movement.
- Elusiveness can throw authorities off guard.
- Safer option for those who can’t publicly advocate the cause due to fear of social repercussions.

DECOLONIZATION AS CARE

“In many ways, the relationships I have with materials are as intimate as
   with humans in a contemporary moment. Extending that
   line of thought in which one would think the identity of a
   human, to think of the identity of non-humans in the same
   capacity, on the same ontological plane, provides the pos-
   sibility of an intersectional subjectivity to the thing itself.
   In the same way that I hope we would respect and consider
   all human individuals, I would respect and consider the
   ancient ceramics that I am working with; to consider them
   not just as vessels to be used by humans, but as vessels unto
   themselves, having certain material capacities. They have
   their own potential and kinetic energy, their own texture,
   their own feel; there is so much to them that goes beyond
   what we ascribe to them. Not recognizing these things
   as having their own vibrancy and vitality is indicative of
   being a part of a system in which objectivity requires us
   to remove subjectivity from material things.”

“In setting up objectivity as criteria to uphold,
   western academia has distanced us from ourselves. For
   example, to provide an air of neutrality, we are taught not
   to write with ‘I’ in science, when in fact one of the ways
   in which we first understand the world is through the ‘I,’
   and one of the ways in which we continue to understand
   the world and encounter nature, feel the breeze, look at
   green leaves, look at the sky, is through that ‘I.’”

“By granting myself the ‘I’ everything was granted an ‘I’ and there was an
   intersectional subjectivity that provided a network of kin
   and care that went beyond a humancentric approach to the
   world. This included the many sets of relations I have with
   the built environment, with trees, with soil, with ancient
   ceramics, with other/non-human animals, with everything
   around me. By reclaiming myself, I recognized the larger
   world within which I was deeply entangled.”

“And so through alliances and creating kin with others (human/non- human), we maintain and protect ourselves. And ultimately, that care for and with others is also self-care. Once we recognize ourselves,
          we begin to recognize our positions, and how our positions
      may be at the expense of others, be those others human
        or non-human.”

MAP OF POTENTIAL COMMUNICATION

Rectangular room : the room I am in.
Open pathway in the bottom : a physical exit/entrance.
Blue : texts and phone calls made to friends.
Yellow : walking down the stairs, to my family.
Peach : reaching out to people online.

I did not want to expose the architecture of my house nor the location of nearby establishments in a literal sense due to privacy. So I took an abstract approach.

ALTERNATIVE SPEAKER'S CORNER

🇬🇧
"The first page before the 'storyboard'"-> the electronic appliances used in lieu of doing it by hand OR an instruction manual page."

Explanation :

At first I wasn't sure what an alternative speaker's corner was, but after the explanation during class I decided to take inspiration from Semiotics of the Kitchen by Martha Rosler and Chantals Akerman's home-centric films. I tried to create an alternative speaker's corner that I can easily do from home because I cannot leave the house to experiment outdoors due to local quarantine laws.
I wanted to highlight the therapeutic qualities of rhythm and routine (also mentioned by Chantal Akerman in the video I attached above) that has the ability to ground many people and make them feel like they have a semblance of control over their lives, since many of the COVID 19 induced stress is actually caused from anticipatory grief: the grief and anxiety caused by not knowing what is to come.
Being quarantined has also made many people--including myself--notice which aspects of our lives are 'truly' essential for example building connections (both with other people, the self and nature) and living with what we have instead of constantly aiming for more. These two aspects were also brought up in Designs for the Pluriverse and Decolonization as Care. Basically prioritizing a sustainable practice of coexisting with nature instead of constantly trying to dominate it as well as building communities.
The choice of platform to present the alternative speaker's corner was chosen because personal blogs feel more intimate than a page on twitter or instagram, and I was also inspired by the multitude of great blogs introduced to me via the guidebook such as Bitter Melon, and even inactive ones like Learning to Love You More.

Update June 4th: Hopefully I'm not too late but here are the promised layered files for risoprinting! If anything is faulty please let me know via email 🙂

I grouped with Maya for the resit period. After all these months of isolation it was refreshing to work together again.
Since the lockdown was basically over for her, while I was already back in Armenia in a full quarantine, we couldn’t relate the COVID isolation of April anymore. First, we had the idea of doing a projection mapping and sharing thoughts of people on buildings, so basically having the contrast of small bits of personal thoughts on big, uncomfortable spaces. This took us to a conversation about our current situations, and we realized that, in a way, we have similarities in our background: some current political heat, the socialist past, a lot of abandoned spaces.
We thought it’s more relevant and more open (educational, why not) to combine our current situations, common historical past and connect our project to it.

Also, we noticed how the quarantine detached people from the world, as everyone was literally interacting with their own close, small environment (room, laptop screen), so we wanted to create a space where people could just share simple images from their lives and see, learn what life is like in other parts of the world.

We thought of making collages with all these scenes/buildings and distribute it as posters around with short texts about human survival/class struggle/social conditions, however, not in a very sophisticated way.
For collecting images and sharing with people, we thought opening an Instagram and taking people’s submissions of places they live in, or just images from their city that mean something to them. This could be an Instagram page for instance. That would also allow to create a network and share personal images of scenery, to make these collective images (collages) and talk about really simple, human actions and encourage humans to share their visual environments with each other and think about questions, especially after/during a pandemic that has made us question a lot.

Our audience is every citizen, every person who evern walks around or just wonders how people further than they are living.