During this module and especially through the experiment I designed and executed, I wanted to explore how the digital world can meet the handmaking process. I work with collage by using copies of my family's photos and found/ used materials like envelopes, cardboard and newspaper. My tools usually include glue, craft knife, scissors, needles and sewing threads. In my research I am looking at the possibilities of exploring identity by manipulating photos of my ancestors which I treat as skin sites. I am considering skin as an archive of the transgenerational transmission and I attempt to look at the present by intervening on past archives. As my research proceeds, one of my concerns, is how the focus on an individual's family tree affects-concerns-becomes a collective question on identity and how the responsibility of the ways we choose to look at the past, affects present and future narratives.
Therefore, I designed an experiment which took place at the multimedia cultural center OT301 on Sunday 21st of March, during my residency at the 4bid Gallery, part of the Wild Bodies module. The experiment was a 5hour live-stream of collage making, aiming towards the interaction with the audience, the decisions taken and the actions performed on the photos. The first 3 hours took place on jitsi.org and I chose this platform because it allows long-hours recording free of charge. The technician of OT301, Pierre, set the live-stream by using an external camera connected to OBS, a screen monitor and additional lighting. Knowing that after 3hours, the equipment had to be taken away, I had planned to continue for the remaining hours, on another platform, Instagram. As a user of this platform, I know that as soon as someone goes live, every 'follower' gets notified, and that for as long as the live goes on, it appears in the homepage as an option to click on. While I was using jitsi, the camera was set on a tripod in an overhead shot that enabled me to work freely while the audience had a clear view and understanding of my movements, the materials, the photos and the overall image. They could interact with me by using their microphones, and they were urged to talk and collaborate among them at the same time. When I moved to Instagram, I used my phone. The quality of the image wasn't lost, but the angle (ground level shot) was limiting. I had to rearrange my body constantly in order to have a clear image of the collage making on camera, as well as handle the phone according to what was needed to be seen. Moreover, the interaction was limited, as only one person at a time could request to share the live with me, and the rest were to use the chat, which was challenging for me to follow, and for them to engage. Overall, due to the setting that Pierre enabled me to have, jitsi was by far the most suitable platform. Yet, have I had someone to handle the phone on the Instagram live and help me interact (as doing a collage and handling the phone at the same time requires more than 2 hands), it would have perhaps worked better. Although I tried to promote my jitsi live-stream days before Sunday, by planned reminders on social media, the audience I gathered was about 14 people. Whereas on Instagram, the interaction was less, yet the people coming in, was more frequent.
In any case, the audience in both platforms, was informed that this was an open studio experiment, that aimed to look into the narratives that are being created by their decisions on which actions are to be taken and was asked to take control over the photos displayed. In my understanding, their decisions were varying from ideas to create a specific story, 'what if' propositions, connecting pieces of a puzzle that they recognized as fit, or actualizing their understanding coming from different backgrounds and with personal experiences of ancestral and interpersonal relations. From time to time, I would reveal information about my research, either to create a more hospitable space, or because I was asked to. Certain people attended this open studio for a good amount of hours, and without necessarily constantly interacting, I understood that with time, they also developed a more in depth connection with what they were seeing and what decisions they were making. For instance, one of the main components of my research came up, when someone pointed out the difference of cutting the photos with a craft knife or tearing them apart. Through this remark, I decided to discuss my view of the photos as skin sites, and how the treatment of their surface is in conjunction with actions upon the skin.
Put simply, it was as if the audience was the mind and I was the hands. The audience taking the decisions and my hands executing the actions. However, it is more complex than that, since the audience was embodying their engagement, even through their screen, by the very act of looking or guiding what they wanted to look at. I was executing, but I was also offering insights that definitely affected their decision making, by the way I organized the space, offering an overhead shot, having chosen certain photos for this experiment beforehand, choosing to only work with the photos of my mother's side, talking about the research, having specific tools to work with, by the fact that my personal aesthetics influenced how I received a suggestion of a cut, and by revealing the story behind a photo when asked.
Many pointed out that whether they would interact or not, what was important to them, was seeing the making of. That it had a different impact from experiencing a finished collage, than to witness the moment of tearing and gluing of the photos. It was the fact that they were witnessing not a suggestion of narratives and possible identities, but actually experiencing the gradual process of things coming together and stories being written. This was interesting to me because besides wanting to see how the online can meet with a handmaking process and outcome, I had one more major reason for doing this experiment. So far I have envisioned that the final work of my dissertation will engage the audience in an interactive way where they will have the agency of the narration of 'completed' collages that can be re-arranged. Through this live-stream I realized that even by being online, the witnessing of the (re)/(de)construction of the archives can be very impactful in how the individual becomes collective. Personal archives play a major role in the collective memory as they indicate 'how individuals remember the past, characterize community relationships in the present, and memorialize activities over time' in so far as community memory is built upon “connections between individuals”' (Giannachi, 2016, 146). I am interested in seeing whether personal archives can also enable us towards collective reflections created in the present. For the time being, I am not considering a live collage making for my final work, but in the next months I will definitely reflect more on this insight, and I am sure that it will affect how I will design the experience of the audience.
The video below contains moments out of the 3 hours on the live-stream on jitsi. I have gathered key moments of my interaction with the audience, from instructions to questions, stories about the photos, and discussions between the participants themselves.
The stills below are indicative selections from the Instagram live-stream.
Two days after the live-stream, and while I was watching the footage, I completed the collage by bringing all the outcomes together and binding them into a cardboard based book. Most of the collages had already been glued on the cardboard with the audience, and so there were few decisions that I had to take. I decided to finish on my own the pictures that weren't used at all during the open studio, and which had been printed for this experiment in the first place. Then, I used the empty spaces to glue or sew the collages that hadn't been added on anywhere, as well as pictures with a negative space (=pictures that we cut and used only a part of, leaving the rest of the image with a blank space of a figure). The order of the collages was partially determined by the natural folding and coming together of the cardboards and partially by my new additions. Watching the footage while I was working on the collage, was very revealing to me. It highlighted to me the slow process of things coming together. Re-living the decisions and ideas that formed each image, as I was still working on them, resembled a sensation of having a time machine and travelling back to the moments that these photos were actually taken. It was as if I could go backwards in time. A reconstruction of the reconstruction. More than that, I noticed that it even impacted the new decisions I had to take and how I handled each item knowing that it came out of a collective practice.
This is the finished collage.
The live-stream enabled a handmaking process that the audience could only witness through a screen. On my own, I worked on the collage while watching the footage of what has already been done. The collage that resulted into a book, is in my room and hasn't been seen live by anyone else. To continue with the interaction of the audience and test what narratives the collective making can possibly offer, I took pictures of parts of the collage, focusing on the ones that were brought together through the live interaction and posted them on Instagram for 24h, bringing back to the online world, the handmade. I asked: What do you see? What narrative is being created here? What is their story? What happened here?
The answers I received are the following.
1.
Panayiotis' voice message: 'The value of dance in the old days as a means of expression and entertainment'.
In this instance, most of the answers, which also happened to come from Greek people, focused on the zeibekiko dance that the man is performing. So the cultural background influenced greatly the way they understood this collage, while it also made them focus on that first level and impression.
2.
Panayiotis' voice message: 'Equality between man and woman. They are becoming one being, one identity'.
In this instance the answers varied from recognizing a past in the present, a masculine element coming together with a feminine one, and different descriptions of short stories.
3.
In this collage, the responses aimed mostly on relations between generations and family.
4.
Panayiotis' voice message: 'Contrast between the 2 photos of hugging and standing. They can express specific feelings that are acceptable. Being serious, not exaggerating'.
In this collage, the responses were quite different, from literal to metaphorical, and from hypotheses that regarded the whole synthesis, to specific parts of the image.
5.
Panayiotis' voice message: 'Contrast. The man is mocking the dancer'.
A lot of responses on this collage had to do with lost dreams, memories and failure.
6.
Panayiotis' voice message: 'The child in the middle is one of the two when they were young. They want to have a baby that they will raise being just like them'.
For this collage, a lot of responses were describing a particular imagined story regarding the couple in color in relation to the baby in front.
7.
Panayiotis' voice message: 'People on the beach and man in the suit are expressing themselves through body and face, in contrast to the girl who is unexpressive and static'.
This image brought up thoughts on expressiveness, adulthood and responsibilities.
8.
For this collage, people described unfortunate marriage situations, women forced into marriage, and read in the picture a decisive moment in the life of a/the woman.
9.
In this picture, the responses focused on an intimate relation of the woman towards the man, describing the woman as his grandmother, mother or wife. The feelings they described were love, warmth, pride and apathy.
10.
Panayiotis' voice message: 'The Greek element of close contact and warmth through hugging and kissing'.
For the last collage, the most common response was 'love'.
Through these responses, I realized that:
I was expecting more metaphorical answers and fabricated stories. I noticed that questions like 'What do you see?' gave more literal responses. But questions like 'What's their story?' activated the imagination.
Working with personal family photos can exceed the very personal boundary because everyone is projecting what they want to see or what they can see coming from specific cultural and personal backgrounds. Therefore the possible narratives are as many as the people who will engage with them.
Collage by its nature is endless in options not only in its possible formations but also in its possible readings, and so is identity.
I would like to extend the points above by bringing in Amelia Jones, who notes that Ulay's work 'engages later viewers as collaborators as well, by opening his body/image to the relationality of interpretation and identification' (2015, 1). Although I am not working with self-portraits, I am trying to offer the images of my ancestors (which in an anachronistic way also contain me) to reconstruct my identity and at the same time evoke multiple interpretations. Through the responses I received, I realized that this could also evoke identifications of the viewer and stimulate reconstructions of their identity in relation to the transgenerational transmission. Further, I am embracing the idea of the identity in constant transformation. Jones underlines how Ulay used art to 'explore the instability of the self rather than to cohere this self: the “auto” or “self” to which he has also referred can only ever occur “through change,” in process, never ending, even after death' (2015, 13). Similarly to how Ulay viewed identity, Giannachi G. argues that the archive is the tool that defines and produces our presence and so it must be 'emergent, relational, in flux' and 'subject itself to constant change, precisely so as to redefine our presence from what is other to it' (2016, 25). Archives similar to identity, must been seen as constantly open to be reconstructed and re-interpreted. Through collage as a practice but also as a metaphor, I understand identity as being in constant transformation, having multiple possibilities of reconstruction, but always stemming from something given, something shaped from the greater past. Before my hands can even touch the photographs, they (the photos) are already determined by the past and although I can transform them, they never lose their trace of origin . My identity is in constant change as well, but my ancestors shaped me, before I was even born. Therefore even in constant change, as an archive, I am always in reference to them.
This experiment focused a lot on the use of social media and in particular Instagram; from announcing the open studio, to continuing the live there, and finally asking the questions about the finished collage. Personally, I am becoming less and less active and open about my artistic presentation on the internet. I promote the projects I am part of as a collaborator, but as far as my personal work is concerned, I am avoiding making public on social media or having an organized online archive of my work. I am contemplating on this constantly, as it is not that I don't want to have an open access to the works. So far, it seems that my work is dispersed on different sites and it starts resembling family material archives. Some dispersed in different houses, some piled in cardboard boxes in the attic, some mixed with others of another era, some only remembered, some replicated and some carefully framed and often re-visited. The era of digital archivization has expanded to individuals self-archiving through the tools of organization that social media provide. Its rare to not find traces of a performance or an artifact in the digital world. To be online means to also exist in the physical world. The exhibition of one's identity is almost manifested through the digital archivization (Giannachi, 2016, 146). In the case of this experiment that used social media as a way to communicate and actualize a handmade process, I like to think that there will be no easily traced remaining archive of the final outcome. The link of this blog will not be shared publicly and only the few who have it will be able to view the edited video of the live-stream, and any other online presence that took place, but still in an transformed form that shapes in specific ways the spectatorship. For me this not an elitist selection of who gets access to the work, but rather reversing the idea that just because something happens online, it has to stay online. It then becomes a question of what exactly stays online out of all this and in what ways do I chose to disseminate it to more people than those who participated in the live.
Sources:
Giannachi, G. (2016) Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Jones, A. (2015) Individual Mythologist: Vulnerability, Generosity, and Relationality in Ulay’s Self-Imaging'. Stedelijk Studies. Available from: https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/individual-mythologist-jones/