Meisje met het subtiele witte...

street, chalk, game.

Projectplan

Title: Epistolart

Idea: Help people to retake contact with family or friends via letters made by me.

Analysis: The fact I didn't have any place to work during the last assignments made my colleagues and me work outside. Because of that, we were able to understand how Piushaven daily life is. We saw lot of movement in the area next to the bridge: couples, families, workers...
The area is alive and you can notice it just seating and watching for five or ten minutes. To see all these people made me realize I wanted to work with them, do something directly to people.

Imageplan: The mainly idea is to set a little post office in Piushaven area. It will be just one place where you can send some "special" letters to your loved people.
The goal I want to get: I want people retake contact with people who they miss.
I am going to create the letters one by one (between 50 and 100 letters). All of them are going to be full of good feelings and words everybody wants to read, for instance: I miss you, I wish you were here... Also some visual poems (like René Heyvaert's work).
After all these letters are made, I want to digitize them and create an epistolary which will contain all of them.
This epistolary is going to be used to show people how the letters look like, it's going to be an announcement of what they are going to send.
Letters will be closed and ready to send, so people won't know what is inside. They have to trust me and write the wished address, then, I'll send the letter for free.
It's difficult people trust someone unknown, that's the reason why I have to announce myself time before with some flyers, letters...
People have to know when, where and why the post office will be.

Schedule: I can't make any timetable yet due to problems with the assigned location. Probably I'll combine this project with my graduation project from fourth year at home or school.

Costs: Costs are going to be related to different materials to make the letters. Also some prints to publicy my work, small tent to set the office and mail costs by the moment.
I also have to work on looking for some sponsor to be able to give some gift to people and attract them.

Images: Examples of how the letters can look like.

Coments: After explaining my plan to Heddy, we came to conclusion I can go on with the project, but there are some problems to fix: It seems to be difficult to make it real because is not easy to attract people and probably they are not going to trust me.
Hille agrees with what Heddy is saying, and he gave me some possible solutions or ideas. One of them is to offer something to guests and attract them (like an ice cream). Other idea is to focus my project to a more specific public, for example: children. To come to my office, children must be with their parents, so I'll have more visitors.

Mail art: René Heyvaert

I found my inspiration in the belgian artist René Heyvaert. He used a minimal and personal
art to express oneself and keep in contact with family or friends.
Lonelyness and sickness made these visual poems arrive to a very specific and loved public.

Fast rythm

I took the first picture while we were "Collecting the City", and the second one during "La route trouvé" presentation.
In front of our eyes, enviroment is changing. In both pictures, you can see the same white house, but in only one of them you can see the new building structure, made in approximately three or four days.

Short explanation about what we were making this week.

Working in our eventually location

Pictures of the subjective work process in the Collecting the city assignment.

Working around the harbour

Because we had some problems with working space, we decided to take the enviroment and harbour surroundings to start our projects.

The chosen place motivated us to work; as you can see in the pictures, it is a nice place to stay (when the weather makes it possible).

This is our personal vision of how the world is turning upside down.

Rotterdam

From Rotterdam Centraal Station to Rotterdam Zuid I could see huge, strong and stable buildings, ships, sculptures...
Everything was magnified and structured in a way that I, as a spectator of the city, I felt absorbed by it.
I think the magnitude the city shows is good for it, it seems to me to have a secure image about itself.
Amongst it all I missed something closer to me, to make contrast with this magnitude of the city.
From my point of view as a visitor and also a creator, I would add something close to the human, weaker, ephemeral and similar to human size to look at it at the same level.
A sculpture made with a ephemeral material in which the weather and animals living in the area can play a roll could work.
I think bread is a good material for this prototype because is close to the daily human life, it can change with weather conditions and animals will take part in it easily.