I’m drawing, writing and talking to residents throughout most of the days, and day by day I get to know both the space and its residents better. I’m as well beginning to grasp the extent of my blind spot and my relatively limited outlook here on the square/plaza, visiting, for four weeks…
But with that said, so many of the people who are using the space have continued being warm, open and curious. As an example (that could give a hint of that friendliness) I have by now been offered seven meals, plus several ice creams, teas, sodas and different snacks.
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Drawing is at the center of the project I am working on here, and it has been quite a challenge in many ways. Besides the technique and amount of detail I work with being slow in itself, drawing is made much harder by me being such a central figure in the space, where everybody sees me – and I only draw people doing their thing without them being aware of me… But the children actually made it impossible. It was enought that they saw that I was even drawing, and they would came up like magnets forming a bigger and tighter circle around me while screaming out who and what I was drawing over the whole plaza.. The motif was always most certainly away or changed..
It also did not help to ask them to go down from my little porch, or even telling them I could not see anything at all anymore.. Of course I am extra easy to ignore when I’m not even speaking German…
So a week ago I built a little kid’s fence around my porch, it’s only 20-30 cm high, made with soft cordon ribbon that I found in the wagon (that even a 3-year-old can pull apart), tied to the now removed mobile wood-step and some small wood crates. It was a bit of a desperate experiment (with the touch of weirdness and humor attached to building a fence to keep people out), but it has been a success! And I think I’ve got down the child disturbances to 5%, while the adults response has been positive with laughs and good luck wishes. Of course there are still children climbing through every day, and the last mornings when I have come out it has even been torn to pieces, but I’m happy. Most children have understood that it was quite impossible to focus, and day by day they seem to think less of what I’m doing, and just doing their thing, without me being part of their play.
Together with the fence I also stopped showing my drawings to the children, because here are probably around 50-60 other kids who also wants to see, and every drawing.. And my house and my life, again and again… It has been a bit sad not being able to share the drawings with the children and I’ve decided to make a little show of my drawings on the last day, and have let them know that I will. It also feels nice for everyone who uses this space and wonder what on earth I could be drawing day out and in.. Even though it’s not at all as intrusive as photography/video, my drawings are still documenting them and their life, where they live and what they do…
I am planning to show the drawings I have made through the big glass walls of my yellow house. It will of course be a bit of a compromise because of the 2-layered reflecting glass in between, but it would be literally impossible to not get them ruined by small hands if presented in any touchable way… It will in the end also just be a kind of glimpse into my process and they will be presented as lose drawings. It’s regrettable that I have no means of presenting them to the residents in a form/composition that would resemble their final installation, where they will be hung so they form one large image, where the different drawings comes alive and interacts with the other drawings (which is somewhat my focus point in the image/installation I’m working on here).
