Yesterday I made some flags from materials found around the building. As works, or perhaps pieces of what might become an installation, they are (un)familiar to me. The flag form is something that has evolved in my thinking over the last year, and was made real with new works for Rest. Those flags were – to me at least – heavily loaded with meaning. Yesterdays flags were not. They were exercises in materiality. The single blue/green curtain is simply that – a length of material that very handily has an opening at one end of the hem which allows me to insert a metal pole that I found in a heap of scrap on the way to the basement. The curtain cloth itself was screwed up on the windowsill of the ’conference room’ on the fifth floor. I had found the cloth the day before and placed it on the floor as an addition … response … intervention to Sorcha’s arrangement of materials in the project room. Something shifted in me yesterday morning and I allowed myself to start thinking of what I am doing here as an extension and development of what I have been doing in the studio in Uppsala. I had been giving myself a hard time thinking that I should find an entirely new approach. The white curtain is the outcome of scouting for materials without a specific objective in mind. I realised that I was missing materials – physical things – to work with. So far on the residency we have been making but without materiality.
The blue/green flag was made and propped up against the wall before I found the white materials. Once assembled I leaned the white flag also against the wall next to its blue/green sibling. It looked staged and ’flat’. I went in search of more materials to make other flags returning an hour or so later to find that the white flag found its own position, it had fallen to the left and came to rest in a corner, the overly long train of fabric pooling on the floor. That chance composition was much more appealing.
Before making the flags we had a project planning meeting. In one week it is Riga’s Final Thursday event – a programme of cultural events on the last Thursday of each month. Kaspars (the project co-host, and founder of the residency) wants to know what we will do … but we do not know what we will do. This week has been a bit of a push and pull between talking about getting something together and at the same time feeling that we (participants) have not yet got any clear idea of what we are doing – either collectively or individually. Participation in Final Thursday is important for the residency – it ticks those visibility and accessibility boxes. It demands however publicity material. The meeting was a moments fruitful – we agreed on an image – and at moments it was awkward – what sort of event would it be, and what should it be called. Various words and phrases were thrown around but nothing seemed to fit – how could it when we didn’t know what we were doing. The meeting ended with us committing to return with a title later that day. In the kitchen we carried on playing with words and phrases, eventually settling on the idea of writing the most appealing on pieces of paper and then drawing them out of a hat. The six of us in the room each draw a word, Aina who had been out of the room returned and created a sentence from the six words. Together we agreed on one change, we had our title: Show the curiosity of losing content
Reflecting on the whole day now I see that losing content and playing with materials allowed me to make something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. I really enjoyed making those two flags. I don’t know what they mean … I don’t think that they ’mean’ anything, and they do not need to. It is almost like asking what do I, or anyone else, ’mean’. We don’t mean things, we simply are things.
