This project required us to find ways to understand and define ourselves in any form of our choice, an assignment that led us to reflect deeply upon our behaviour, our likes and dislikes, what makes us unique, what we consider private about ourselves, what we don’t mind sharing, what insecurities, fears, and motivations drive us, how we would portray ourselves to an audience of peers, or strangers. What about ourselves would we choose to show, and what would we keep hidden, how do different people and artists define themselves?
I really tried to find answers to these questions in this project and pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone to the maximum, in terms of what stories and personality traits I chose to reveal about myself, by means of this project.
I have had voices in my head for as long as I remember. I think all of us do. Some of these voices, arise from personality traits in us, that we like, or that society considers acceptable. These voices, we are more comfortable with granting audience to. These voices we cherish, embrace and celebrate. It is however difficult to face the voices of our insecurities, or desires, and aspiration that the society demonizes, condemns, or deems shameful. Those we run from. We lock them up in closets in the dark corners at the backs of our minds, not that it makes a difference to their constant whispering.
Inspired by Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee’s style of personifying their characters, i decided to confront the darkest voices in my head that I find most difficult to both face and ignore, by allowing myself to let down the walls I built to keep me from myself. So that i could explore the characters, personalities, motives and opinions of these voices, sketch out and document their distinct personalities, and personify them by dressing up as them and getting photographed as them. The whole process of facing my demons head on was actually very emotional, moving, painful, cathartic, freeing, and exhilarating, all at once. And so I made the decision to define myself by means of my demons,- the parts of me that I fear.
Allow me to introduce you to the voices in my head.
The Slut:
“You are alone.
Nobody is obligated to love you.
And you might not be missed.
Go ahead then,
Listen to your songs and read your books.
You are not fooling me.
Deluding yourself with the idea of a world that does not exist.
Promises that won’t come true.
They never stick around but I do.
I sit with you in your favourite coffee shop at midnight.
I you on your way home from the airport.
I share an umbrella with you in the rain.
I lie when your mother asks you if you are okay.
I smile when your friends introduce you to their girlfriends and boyfriends.
I am their when you wonder about the would have beens.
They never stick around. I always do.
I am your armour,
You NEED me.”
– The Slut.
These were projected on the projector, and the song”Grace Kelly”by MIKA, played from the speakers, to further stimulate the necessary mood. While the writing above, that captures the words of the voice was read by the audience, as the song played and the pictures changed on the projector, to the beat of the music.
Concept:
Slut is the voice in my head who craves attention desperately, instead of shrinking under the weight of her insecurities, she channels them into the attention-seeking , shocking, loud, colourful, and in-your-face way in which she dresses. Above all else, slut is as lonely, as she is crazy. Her unquenchable need for attention makes her reckless in all her choices, and life decisions. However, she is a good person at heart, however needy and insecure she may get with all her self esteem and body image issues. She never leaves me. She is forever in my head. But I try to block her out. It is difficult to accept your loneliness, insecurity, and yearning for attention and love.
I named her slut, because she is the voice who never minces her words or romanticizes any situation. She bears all the mental wounds, that never healed, because all the people who left. This is why she is forever cautious, forever suspicious, never trusting. She talks confidently about her desires for companionship and friendship. She is vocal about her failed relationships. She embodies the confident, jaded, attention demanding, skirt wearing, flirty, forthright, firm, and self-assured female demographic, that society often shames with terms like “slut” .
Slut was shot with a very uncalculated, and tacky point and shoot phone camera, because I thought that the transient nature of that photograph actually went with her personalities. Phone cameras are used to take selfies, that are nearly worthless because of their lack of depth of meaning, planning, and effort required to take the picture. Selfies embody the human society’s cry for attention as well, and so I thought it made sense to use a phone camera while shooting her.
Moreover, slut was shot in a grey staircase that is almost always empty and desolate, to mimic her internal emotional conflict, and the fact that t seems like the space she would escape to, momentarily to collect her thoughts and fix her smile before venturing back into public eye.
Process:
In order to make slut, I went through a very long and tiring process of selecting her outfit. I wanted o come up with something that was loud, colourful and made a statement. But I also wanted her look to be pleasing to the eye. most importantly, I need her to wear something that I would love to, for she is after all a part of me. I tried to come up with an outfit that would amplify my personality, to show an overly exaggerated version of certain aspects of me.
MY favourite aspects of this outfit were the green lipstick,the feather boa, and the fake tattoo, I drew onto myself-all three items that were a taboo to me when I was growing up as a result of the perceptions and judgments of the society.
There is an exhilarating freedom about dressing up as your worst insecurity.
This outfit thus made me lay myself bare, even as I piled on clothes. And to be honest, I loved every second of the process.
Form:
Slut was presented to the audience to the audience by using a power point presentation including these pictures over and over again, with slides to the turning of the beats in the song ,Grace Kelly. While this was in progress the audience read a short piece that voiced her words.
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Clementine:
We were on our hands and knees
looking for words.
We looked behind doors and under coffee tables,
Under beds and at the backs of forgotten drawers.
We looked in the pockets of others and inside bags,
Behind paintings and under hats.
We scrambled around desperate
for vowels and consonants,
Screamed from atop mountains for any letters to spare.
Hunted for them under cupboards,
and on rooftops,
Only to find them depressingly bare.
After searching high and searching low,
we even through open the windows.
And after we ran out of places to look in,
We began inventing our own.
I looked for our words
In the neighbour’s putrid breath,
and a not quite innocent shrug.
You looked in a mask,
a staged laugh,
I searched in a hesitant hug.I looked in dreary bus journeys,
You seemed to grow as dull as dust.
Then in our desperation and despair,
we found the courage to look inside each others eyes.
And found nothing there.
You thought you saw the hint of an ‘i”
I thought I caught a glimpse of an ‘f’.
That could mean familiarity,
Or fucks of which there were none given.
But regardless of how thing turned out between us,
Nobody can deny,
We started out ordinarily, as ordinarily
as exceptional friends do,
With trunks full of words, a pocket full of hugs,
and a million colourful smiles to go with each.
But we used our words up too fast.
Our pockets rendered empty,
Our smiles lost their luster,
We were left aghast.
Our presence in each other’s vicinity, the only memory of the times gone.
We open our mouth and our lips frame the words we lost to time.
Concept:
I always wanted to be named Clementine after one of my favourite fruits.Clementine is deep, perceptive, intuitive, calm, quiet and blissful, She is the part of me that surfaces when I listen to exceedingly deep, melancholic, open-ended and contemplative song which prompts me to become quiet, solemn, introspective and more often than not, sad. Clementine is a sharp contrast from the slut, and very few people have seen that side of me.
Since Clementine is that part of me who loses bits of her heart and soul to lyrics from her favourite songs and poems, spends all her time content in her own company, with her earphones and playlists, I decided to show her sitting on her bed in front all the fragmented lyrics from her favourite songs, put together in a confused and yet eloquent almost poetic crowded visual. She sits in front of it, the folds of the white crumpled fabric of her clothes blending with the folds of toilet paper, that she sits among, and in front of. She has slit her wrists and they reveal that ink, not blood runs though her veins-the ink that writes her poems with, her stories and the lyrics on the wall.
Clementine is a very serene soul, and I tried to set the mood with the help of sunlight falling on the wall, and image editing effects. Black letters trickle down from the slits in her wrists. Her hair is open, natural wild and free, and her eyes I highlighted, by adding layers if talcum powder around my eyes so hat the colour, would draw the viewer’s attention straight to the eyes, then to the earphones and then the wall. Also I think that the white around her eyes, not only help her stand out from the other components of her picture, but also makes her a part of it, with the black and white colour scheme in the background being mirrored by the clothes, eyes and hair.
Form:
On choosing these four pictures, out of several others, I brainstormed in search of the form that would best capture Clementine’s personality. Her personality is somewhat an intimate secret personified. So I took a 8.5 x 13 inches cardboard box and covered the outside of it, entirely with toilet paper,so it would look like the room in the photographs, was the room in the box. At the very bottom of the box, I pasted the first the pictures shown above. The last picture was placed behind the box. Inside the box, I also placed heaps of soft toilet paper interspersed with hard bits of card paper with fragmented song lyrics on them. Then I invited my peers to come up to the table one by one and look through the objects, toilet paper and lyrics, in the box until thy reached the bottom where a surprise awaited them. I told them not to tell each other what lay at the bottom of the box.
At the very bottom I placed a white scroll made of handmade paper, with an original poem written on it, titled Six Easy Steps To Lose A Friend, that speaks of a growing apart fro a very close friend. And of course, the very bottom of the box also revealed the pictures taped to the back of it.The script in the poem keeps changing from cursive to non-cursive, because it speaks of the story of two friends t the end of their relationship, and the two scripts are meant to denote the two voices,or characters.
While they explored the contents of the box, I played the song,”Piledriver’s waltz” by Alex Turner, to further manipulate the mood to my advantage.
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Vithabai:
“I remember everything.
I remember when he told me that everything was going to be okay and repeated it everyday until it became the truth.
I remember how the blanket he tucked me into always felt scratchy against my skin.
I remember the frightening sounds of thunder outside the window, during the worst flood to hit home.
I remember your love for Shakespeare, and late night radio shows that always got on grandma’s nerves.
I remember feeling safe.
I remember the last two days.
I remember the rain, the cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, the calm before the storm-the illusion of calm, and the Ice.
Most of all the Ice.
I remember everything.
And so do You.”
-Vithabai
Concept:
Vithabai is the third of the voices I chose to portray. Vithabai is the part of me that continues to grieve my grandfather’s death, and celebrate my memories with him. She is the voice, I fight to keep remembering because I fear that if I lose her, i will lose my memories of and with him. However, Vithabai is also the voice that is the hardest to face.
cithara which from as far I know, directly translates to brick lady, is actually and incredibly old Marathi prayer song, from the time before I was born dedicated to the goddess of Pandharpur. This song was the song that my grandfather dang to me as a lullaby every night, when I fell asleep on his lap as an infant. And he would refer to me as “his Vithabai”. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I remember feeling incredibly important. I played the actual prayer song/childhood lullaby, while my peers went through my next presentation.
One of my lingering, haunting memories of my grandfather is from the time that I kissed his corpse. i remember how it felt like kissing a sack of skin filled with ice, and image that has never left me. Even today, all I have to do is close my eyes, and I can feel that touch lingering on my lips. It is a touch memory, i struggle and grapple to hold on to. I never want to forget anything about him.
Form:
In order to translate that feeling, into a character I made a mask that I could wear around my head and could hold ice, and photoshopped my face into it. I then placed this photograph in my form.
For this one I took two clear plastic cups, one smaller than the other. I placed the smaller cup inside the larger one, and placed the photograph inside the smaller cup. between the two cups i placed crushed ice, which eventually melted to really cold water. on the outer walls of the larger cup, I expressed Vithabai’s voice in cursive using a black sharpie. I wrote these in cursive because my grandfather taught me to write in cursive, when I was a child. In order, to read the writing on the cup, the viewers had to interacted with it, and rotate it as they read, so that their fingers came in contact with the cool surface of the glass, and engaging the sense of touch into the experience.
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By means of this project, i tried to engage every one of the viewer’s senses, the photographs add colours provided the visuals, I tried to use textures (the soft toilet paper, hard card paper, course and textured handmade paper,the smooth cool of the plastic cups filled with water) and the idea of touching certain components in the process of interacting with them, to also stimulate the feeling of a certain atmosphere and personality.
And here is a mandatory picture of me as myself.
Thank you so much, I loved this class.
