Date 8th of April

Hi,
My name is Jonna van Mourik and I'm a second year Fine art & Design teacher student. I'm 22 years old and I live in Rotterdam.

Out for the one and only activity of the day, the groceries!

My birthday breakfast last Saturday.
A crazy time to celebrate your twenty-second birthday!

Since my roommates can't go to the hairdresser anymore, I have been appointed as a hairdresser.
(At their own risk)

Because I don't have an empty wall I used my floor to experiment on a color palette of Rotterdam.

EXERCISE 1

EXERCISE 2

EXERCISE 3

Notes, thoughts and highlights from Designs for the Pluriverse

When people, expertise, and material assets come into contact in a new way that is able to create new meaning and unprecedented opportunities

I've chosen for the text, space place gender, because we have been working on this a lot in my major of art theory recently.

Massey is trying to formulate concepts of space and place (time, too) in terms of social relations, and further to connect these in proper dialectical fashion.
In the economy we live in now, we are more dependent on other countries than ever before.
One of the consequences of this is increasing uncertainty about what we mean by places and how we relate to them.
Can't we reconsider our sense of place?
Time, space and money make the world go round, and we go round that world.
Whatever experiences affect, among other things, is race and gender. The way we can walk through different cities as women, by day or by night, is different because of all these factors.

"the borders of the world's greatest ocean have been joined as never before."

Time-space compression needs differentiating socially. This is not just a moral or political point about inequality, although that would be sufficient reason to mention it; it is also a conceptual point.
An important point is the balance of power with the currents and the movement. Some people are more responsible for this than others. A group of people with jobs that depend on different countries and cultures take the lead in time-space compression.
They use this and take advantage of it.
In conclusion, prosperity plays an enormously important role.

It does seem that mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power.
While 'time' is equated with movement and progress, 'space'/'place' is equated with stasis and reaction.

One of the great one-liners in Marxist exchanges has for long been, 'Ah, but capital is not a thing, it's a process.' Perhaps this should be said also about places; that places are processes, too.
Places don't have to have boundaries. Boundaries may be necessary for practical matters, but they are not necessary to shape an area.

None of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place. The specificity of place is continually reproduced, but it is not a specificity which results from some long, internalized history. Each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations

"What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of the local,
a global sense of place."

Places don't have to have boundaries. Boundaries may be necessary for practical matters, but they are not necessary to shape an area.

EXERCISE 4

I have chosen a new form of communication. An option for my neighborhood to have a chat. As King William Alexander said, we can solve the loneliness virus. Communicate with me through the window.

EXERCISE 5.1

If you look at public actions we immediately thought about demonstrations in general. For example we thought about the demonstrations people held in the 1980s about AIDS and HIV. These actions were often big, sometimes aggressive and attracted a lot of attention from people. In the 1980s people didn’t really talked about or did something against the effects of AIDS and HIV. So people held demonstrations to get more attention for this topic.
Demonstrations in general are often used to change something which is seen as ‘normal’. Think about the demonstrations against climate change or the demonstrations from last year where teachers wanted to get a better collective employment agreement.
The specific aspects of these creations are basically to be heard or seen.

When you look at ‘unseen’ or ‘underground’ actions we thought about interventions for addicts.
In the interventions people with an addiction are often anonymous and go there in secret. They get help from a professional, but they also learn from the experiences from other people with the same addiction.
A pro of this ‘unseen’ action is that the people don’t have to come public with their addiction. They can go in to rehab without the whole world knowing, which can help them to gain courage to do so. And because they are with people who have had the same experiences they can share their stories, without feeling different then anybody else.
A con of this ‘unseen’ action is that people are taken from their self-created world and have to return to the environment where they came from. This is often the same environment where they got the addiction in the first place.
The actions which are used for the interventions for addicts are self-care, personal development and staying healthy.
Another example of something which would gain from being ‘unseen’ or ‘secret’ is a police arrest team.

EXERCISE 5.2

Potential communication in isolation

The possibilities for communication from home are, of course, through internet. Through the window with posters, or "window communication", with posts its. Letters or cards through the mailbox or through the small neighborhood libraries. Organizing indoor activities for your neighborhood through the window or balconies.

Because we are only allowed to go outside for necessary activities I only go outside for the groceries. I take my garbage away. The chances of communication I see here is on the way to the supermarket. We can use the empty shelves in the supermarket or communicate through the glass container. At traffic lights people have to wait anyway, so it's easier to get attention. This also applies to zebra crossings or street corners.

I thought it would be a nice challenge not to choose someone from my network, but to make new contacts in the neighbourhood. This is an extra challenge because physical contact is now forbidden.

A search for meeting new people in quarantine.

"For the new writer."

We have many small library cupboards nearby where people can borrow and leave books. They make a lot of use of them so I saw this as a great opportunity to leave my letter. In the letter I wrote who I am, and that I am looking for, contact, stories and connections.

EXERCISE 5.5

EXERCISE 5.4

Making a code language for the people of Rotterdam.
Making the feelings of the people of Rotterdam visual.
The coloring pages where every color has a code and so you could color your drawing.
Instead of codes, we want to link feelings to a box.
For example, color a box yellow if you feel happy. Color a box purple if you feel anxious. We want to put these posters through the city to visualize the feelings of the people of Rotterdam.
In this way, the feelings of our fellow city dwellers get a voice.

We created a performance where we wanted to know what people are doing these days. We made a sign from a cardboard and hung it up in a busy street. On this sign we wrote the question: What keeps you busy these days?
We didn't want to use social media.
We thought that people would react on it, but we figured out that it were mostly children who reacted on the sign. Adults looked at it, stood still and then walked away again.

This outcome gave us a inspiration for exercise 6.

EXERCISE 6

We wanted to continue the idea of exersice 5 and combine it with the knowledge we got from our experiments.
Instead of asking the question 'What keeps you busy these days?' we wanted to know how people felt these days.
So we created a 'simple' and kind of 'childish' coloring page. Because most of the answers of exersice 5.4 were from children. So we thought it would be a nice idea if the coloring page would look appealing to the children.
The reason why we kept the faces on the coloring page so simple was because we didn't want people to color the faces in because they looked nice or interesting, but because the people wanted to let everybody know how they felt.

We printed the coloring pages on A3 and hung them on different places in the city.

MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE

We got a few responses, but 2 of the posters (the one on the the bench at the playground and the one at the busstop) have been removed. So we believe that the reason for this is that people find it so difficult to talk about their feelings that they grabbed the posters and stole them. Because the other reason why people would do that is because they are mean.

We liked the first reason more.

To finish this project we created 2 posters with the results we got of the posters on the streets.

What brought us to this project were the conversations we overheard in our surroundings.

The fact that the conversation of the day is only about the virus is not strange, which is striking that it is mainly about the facts and not about our feelings or the feelings of others. As a result, we wanted to put the other person as the main objective in our project.

We made a coloring page and hang it in different places in the city so that we would appeal to different target groups.
After collecting all the feelings, we've analyzed the results and then we made a poster to share the information in the form of an infographic.

We want to leave a message with the drawn faces without spoken words. That people walking past the posters become aware of our message without actually mentioning it.
"How does your fellow city dweller feel?"

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.