28.3.10 1
Astudillo
I'm off for Easter to Mr. M.'s village, Astudillo.
Just for you to know there'll be no internet there.
There is electricity, as you can see from the space-age ad they have up on their streets.
26.3.10 0
Give orangutans a break
You are Nestle, and Greenpeace targets you for your unethical practices. What do you do?
a) Establish a dialogue with Greenpeace to see how can you improve such practices
b) Ignore it
c) Try getting the campaign banned
Well, Nestle was uncoscious enough to pick c. That's making a statement, twice: I do not intend to change, and I inted to keep it quiet. Lovely, isn't it?
23.3.10 1
Procrastination, cool doggy style
Whoever started this blog, has no respect for my to-do list.
(How happy is the party dog? How French is the car dog? How Golden Girls are the three top ones?)
@ and MOMA
MOMA has acquired the symbol "@":
"We have acquired the design act in itself and as we will feature it in different typefaces, we will note each time the specific typeface as if we were indicating the materials that a physical object is made of."
A curatorial conceptual leap, or an overstepping reliance on acquisitions as the way forward?
Is a theoretical transaction the best way to deal with immaterial elements?
22.3.10 0
Texts and theory
Texts and theory now available in my website, hopefully many more to come!
Evaluating my options
a) Giving up doing mine (which I've been doing for a while)
b) Trying to ignore (or burn) all the versions and versions that have been popping up here and there
c) Buying a whole lot of these and selling them myself and make great profits
Bags for sale at Joe Fresh for 1 dollar. Go me.
21.3.10 1
Kawamura Ganjavian, memory and smell
Somehow I missed this scenter when DesignMilk posted it. But now I've found it!
I love the visual language it has, and the fact thet they acknowledge the powerful effect of smell on memories ( As Wikipedia puts it, "Odor information is easily stored in long-term memory and has strong connections to emotional memory. This is possibly due to the olfactory system's close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that have long been known to be involved in emotion and place memory, respectively").
Kawamura Ganjavian's portfolio is full of promises...
Kawamura Ganjavian's portfolio is full of promises...
And now, go out and smell the air... it's Spring! (I couldn't wait any longer to say that!)
19.3.10 1
Jane Gowans
Really interesting jewellery from the UK.
What is Jane trying to tell us? A Is this about needyness? About commitment fear?
Via 18kt.
Rich Rubbish
Sometimes designers can be a bit too smart. Even if Marc Jacobs is just having a big fat laugh at the people who buy LV, seeing a trash bag retailing at over 1000 euros can be insulting.
17.3.10 0
Herstories
This semester I'm taking Art Theory and we've started off with the sexuation of education. The professor made it very clear from the first day she was an active feminist (of the difference theory). She believes that since everything we know we learn and experience through our bodies, men and women feel, learn and live differently. I think that's a very interesting theory, maybe not so much because of the difference it declares, but because of the acknowledging of a physicality of wisdom.
Ever since I've been reading the engaging with this topic, I've felt ackward. I have felt angry at the blatant discriminations, but at the same time I've felt kind of torn when presented with "women only" activities. I've understood that females are 90 % of the student body of the faculty and that should be felt somehow. And I've wondered how often are we taught about female artists.
I don't know what I intend to say, really. I have figured out I tend to connect more deeply and more often with female creators (musicians, visual artists). It might just be that the way they put the stories is easier for me to comprehend. It might be that they say things I want to hear.
I have recently been thinking about the words we use to define all this mess. Do you know when kids are bought clothes that are a bit too big for them because they grow so fast they will eventually grow big enough for them? In Catalan and in Spanish they are called something like "growing clothes" or "growable clothes". I wonder if there's such a thing in English. Well, what if there are "growing words"? Words that are a bit too large for you right now, but that you know you will eventually get to fill up and understand completely. Words like feminism or patriarchate. I feel like an impostor using them at the moment, but that might change with time.
The one thing I'd like to put out there is, can the word feminist describe the women of my generation? Has it too much of a baggage? Too many connotations? Too worn out, maybe? Again, I might grow into the word, into its size; but then again it might be the wrong kind of cut for me altogether.
Any thoughts? Any reading recommendations?
PS: Picture via PaperTissue. Wonder where it is from...
16.3.10 1
Kumi Yamashita
Undoubtly talented, although maybe they are more spectacular than sensitive, if you know what I mean. They are exceptional, but maybe the concept could be brought a bit more forward. What do you think?
Via Booooooooom.
12.3.10 0
the answer is Schiaparelli, Elsa Schiaparelli
And the question was about a dress worn by Lady Gaga. I had not seen this piece in a long time and, the other day, google randomly offered it to me. Then everythingmade sense. It so happens she was not necessarily promoting extreme thinness, but illustrating the public about her Surrealist influence. Kudos, Gaga.
Tallas (Sizes)
This installation by Ana Alvarez-Erracalde imitates a shop, where on can try the bodies of women in different shapes, sizes, ages or races.
I am enjoying the aesthetics of it, so very boutique-y, but somehow still very butcher's. in the end, meat is meat, however it is sold to us.
What would you buy in this shop? Do you think there would be a best-seller, or that all models would have some success?
10.3.10 0
Gésine Hackenberg
It's been a while ever since Gésine Hackenberg made this piece, but it's still stunning. The subtlety, the materiality, the joy...
25 years
This weekend I've been at my parent's because it was their 25th wedding anniversary.
Isn't that lovely?
5.3.10 0
Hand/Eye Magazine: Barbie under the needle
Thanks so much to Keith from Hand/Eye magazine for being so generous with his time.
And thanks again for publishing the article. (I hope you guys like it, I don't use this blog to publish long texts, so I am very excited to see the text in such a great place!)
If you don't know this publication, go check it out! I'm a subscriber since number one and the paper editions are BEAUTIFUL.
4.3.10 0
Lúa Coderch
Lúa and I met at "Una Escola Tropical" (A tropical school), a weekend course in Terrassa.
I just found her full portfolio, and I find her work very stimulating and poetical.
She pushes her ideas to their consequential edge.
Here are a few examples of her series "Paroxism of Reading":
"Classifying Joyce"
(picking every single word out of Ulysses and classifying them alphabetically)
3.3.10 0
La teta asustada
La Teta Asustada is a Peruvian movie nominated to "best foreign film" for the Oscars.
It's the story of a young woman who suffers from a strange illness: "la teta asustada" (the scared tit). This happens to the children of those raped and tortured women during the violent 80s and 90s, and the illness is transmitted throught breast milk.
The movie is full of a paused sense of magic and light, and has a rare sensitivity. It's absolutely mind-blowing (although in an implosive rather than explosive way).
Spanish TV has in online for free, but I don't know if you can access it from outside Spain.
2.3.10 0
Great minds think alike...
... or how else would you explain these?
Both are tables designed to look like wooden toys (see the difference between Mexican toys and Norwegian toys).
The first one is the Mesa Pirueta by Paulina Gonzalez Ortega (whom I met at CSM) and Andres Ocejo.
The Parrots Party
When I was at CSM, it was uncool to like Hayon. Don't ask me why. It might have been only within my circle. It might have been that he's is a very "arty" designer. It might have been those pics of him in a bunny suit. It might have been his recurrent use of his own work for inspiration. I don't know. Thing is, lots of people seemed very uptight about his work.
Now that I'm elsewhere in life, I feel free to say a bit louder "I quite like that". And well, I actually enjoy his collection with Lladro very much.
1.3.10 1
Lost things
Magical and sweet, lovely imaginery. She looks like a cross between Christina Hendricks (aka Joan from Mad Men) and Fornasetti's drawings of Lina Cavalieri.
Via All the mountains.
At the zoo!
This is a hard one.
This semester half of my drawing lessons are going to be at the zoo.
Now, as a vegan, I feared that I'd find it hard to swallow.
But the truth is, I have not seen mistreated animals (admitedly the big felines didn't seem very lively); and it's been well, fun! and challenging, too.
You see, the last semester we had endless (a class is 3 hrs long) amounts of fun drawing toga-ed up statues and architectural elements and vegetables (which I liked the most). All, with no pictures or rulers or any other accessory than eyes and hands.
I look forward to understanding better how zoos work and how I feel about them, and, in the meanwhile, draw a lot.
(I befriended a goat which seemed to really like my coat; a great, wise turtle sniffed me out and decided to walk away; a vulture as tall as me kind of charged towards me, a dolphin pooed right on my face (there was glass in between us), flamingos wore fluorescent feathers; and hippos had really tiny legs)
