For Bridge 2, our influences were Haruki Murakami and Marina Abromavic. For my side of the research, I had to learn about Murakamis writing. Oli suggested his short story “All God’s Children Can Dance” which was their favorite Murakami piece, I also read an interview he did with The Paris Review. While researhing a form of art I dont usually go to, writing, I found the short story and his writing to be very interesting and his existential topic really made me made some questions. Apart from that, his language was very detailed and entertaining which i very much appreciated.
For our final collaborative piece, me and oli wanted to merge Marina’s intricate use of her body in her pieces and Murakami’s concepts like the relationships with his characters with themselves and their beliefs into a series of pictures that would interpret our own conversation and feelings of our bodies with the aspects of beauty and societal standards. Although I do feel like the final peice could hav been more cohesive and could have had a better trasition between both our parts, I was pleased by the presentation and the topics it rose such as the sexualizing and the beauty of the body (brought up by Stella). In terms of if the piece was succesful, as I said, i think that with our obstacles and last minute decisions, we ended up with a good piece that represented Oli’s and my relationship with our bodies. And again, I do wish we could have made our parts transition better.
Working with Oli was fun. they are very funny and full of opinions, it was almost complicated to decided on what idea to go with. Through the process, I do have to admitt that we got caught up with time because of a missunderstanding of time on my side. the process was fairly easy because we always had constant communication and we always put our input. On top of that, even with those obstacles i think my expericnce working with Oli was good and I think we came up with a good project to present to the class. :):):)
