Monday 15th February
During the seminar discussions were made on the topics of different practitioners. One of these practitioners who was of particular interest was Dee Headon whose autobiographical work links well with what we are attempting to use in our piece. By people documenting their personal stories on a common domain, a sense of community is created. The idea of cathartic release was introduced to me by a practitioner called Adrian Howells and his piece called Salon Adrienne. In the piece Adrian takes on the role of a hairdresser who asks the clients personal questions about their life. The clients left the experience saying that they felt clean and that they had been able to get rid of emotional baggage, a concept that really intrigues me.
For a few days now I have been concerned about the falseness of our concept, how it feels like we are marketing Lincoln rather than creating a piece of performance (something which Steve confirmed when discussing the idea with him). A huge part of this I feel is the way in which we approach people, asking them to write their feelings, making them feel uncomfortable. The idea of an installation could therefore be the solution to this problem.
I discussed with the group about the idea of potentially leaving the board in a location with people’s stories playing through speakers. We could potentially layer a sheet of acetate each hour to show the different interactions and emotional feelings in a place throughout the course of the day. A potential problem with this is that we have no way of controlling how many people contribute to the work. We could reach the end of the day with three words on the board. One way of combating this is placing the board in a ‘place’ along the high street where people sit and socialise rather than walk past without noticing their surroundings.
Joe Turner
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