It’s 14:15 in London and I still need to pack. My flight is at 7am tomorrow, thankfully from Heathrow, which is 10mins drive from my house. Doesn’t look like I’m getting much sleep tonight.
During the past two weeks I have been battling with the German embassy over my visa, instead of recovering from my eventful time in Israel (details would take up a whole other blog’s worth of writing…). Finally, the day after my original flight on 27 August I received my passport with the visa. Hence, having booked my new flight last night I am still packing at this stage.
The tricky part of it all is equipment. Most of my work relies of video cameras and computers. I have borrowed a very nice HD camera from a friend (thanks Chris!) but have no laptop… I have always been ok working on my desktop, and, to tell the truth, wouldn’t have it any other way. Resolution: I need to have both. But until then, I’ll have to do with what I actually own…
The idea of HomeBase, now in it’s fifth year, is to bring together artists from different countries on the basis of their response to the idea of Home. Each artist was also asked to donate a piece of work. I decided to submit two photographs taken with my Holga cam a couple of years ago. One in my home in Tula, Russia, and one here in London. The idea was to investigate installation in domestic environment, also referring to art installation -or what we call immersive installation. Although the art installation assumes ‘someone else’ as the inhabitant, I found that there are a lot of similarities between the two and especially in how we place ourselves within those. The art installation is made with the visitor in mind and how they would navigate the space. A domestic ‘installation’ relies on similar rules. Is there space for chance in these? For disorder*?
I decided that I will set myself a series of tasks or rules over this residency. While going through and selecting the images for donation I realised that I’d like to work with still photography more than I have done in the past couple of years. At the same time I find that writing is becoming more important in my work.
With this in mind, I should go and pack.
*not mess
