This week, Kameron, Zalak, and I made tremendous headway on our mapping project. We took our first walk on Thursday morning with a few inklings of ideas that we could try out for our final project. We made a few connections but overall our ideas didn’t have a strong enough concept.
The next day we headed to the Trienalle to see an exhibit designed by Andrea Branzi and Kenya Hara called “Neo-Preistoria”. Having no prior knowlegde as to what to expect from this exhibit, we entered the dark corridor where we found a series of mirrors, rock formations, and glass cases with artifacts. In the background there was a soundtrack of heartbeats and jungle noises which enhanced the primordial feeling of the exhibit. As we meandered through, we realized that each artifact was labeled with a verb and a poetic definition of the verb. The word and image correlations were so striking at times that I got chills.
As we moved through the exhibit, the artifacts got younger and younger in age. At the beginning, I thought I would be seeing ancient artifacts all the way through but as it turns out, the artifacts were dated more recently the farther along we made it through the exhibit. It was so interesting to make the journey through man’s inventions. It really drew attention to the great strides and downfalls of humanity.
Something interesting I noticed about the exhibit design was the walking pattern. As long as I followed the numbers, it really felt like a trip through time where I was aware of my progression.
Later that day, something clicked. I thought, what if we compared our journey through the city of Milan to the journey of man’s objects through time? Conceptually, it was sound. Our first building is a fascist icon and our end building is a pillar of modernism. Our walk through Milan was a clear evolution that could be represented through found objects.
So, Friday afternoon we set out to walk our path one last time. This time, we paid attention to the mood of our every surrounding and collected items that captured the essence of our locations. Some of these items included flowers, tickets, stones, and perfume samples.
When we went home to work, we had fun figuring out the best way to display our “artifacts”. We decided to use some granola bar boxes and some white paper to create a museum display effect. I had a lot of fun coming up with the words and definitions for our exhibit. It made me realize how much I enjoy language and writing economically. It’s a different kind of artistic challenge. I have included some of my sketches for the project below!
