Sink back into observation as practice.
The past two/three weeks felt very trodden down, slow.
Post midterms not much was done, which is fair.
I don’t like marking this project according to institutional timelines but hey, thats what we are working with at least for now.
Then I did some tryouts:
-Animation frames; that one I actually really love. Engraving the bread with frames and then baking and then scanning it and animating again is beautiful - not sure what to think about the inherently digital production techniques used - especially the lasercutter, but that’s also the easiest route for now.
Was thinking about using lye to print on the bread-plates, but printing involves preparing screens and that feels like an awful lot of hassle for producing singular frames and not a series of prints.
Anyways - like it. Might use it later.
-Breadman in his bread city. Worked more on the Unity worldbuilding aspect, and imported the 3D scans of my grandmother’s and my parent’s houses and had the bread marionette walk through it, which I also like aesthetically, especially with some fog.
This also links back to the memory space Idea I was working on for my prediploma. I like him discovering the spaces there is something humble about it, childlike curiousity in a space that is so abstracted from reality it creates a feeling of serenity, safety.
-Bread mask puppet - The one I am currently working on, making a short-stick-puppet as it is described in the “Bread and Puppet Theatre Vol.1 by Stefan Brecht”. According to Brecht the small stick operated in front of the performer’s neck/head results in the most natural movement and illusion.
So I made a bread mask that one can attach a stick to. I still need to sew the fabric on. This way of playing a puppet only leaves one arm free for interaction. I want to walk around the city and give out little fish or something - wearing it.
- I also made little fish and a bread oroboros.
The fish are cute, nothing out of the ordinary.
The oroboros turned out so wonky. It was the last of the leftover dough and Lena mentioned a few days ago that it could be a nice symbol to work with - so i decided to make one but at that point my oven had been running for 3 hours and it was past midnight and I just wanted to sleep, so I really winged it hard. But somehow it is cute in its wonkiness.
Few notes on that:
I have this strange respect of people I know distantly from school and friends of friends, maybe we pregamed at one point or another or were at the same birthday get-togethers but really I never talk to them because they scare me or intimidate me.
I have this idea of having flown out of that space in order to accomplish becoming more fully myself. And somehow that strikes me as a very cowardly approach. Running from your problems. Somehow this is what constitutes the dissonance I am experiencing. My personal development around my hometown stopped, froze in time, while I just left, re-planted myself and lived more freely someplace else.
But my ties are not fully severed, its a weird in-between, coming back. When I am back I am still confident, but not directly, the facade easily breaks when relationship/sexuality topics do come up. But I am also sick and tired of that and kind of want to just go through with some discomfort to get it done with - it’s not that deep.
Anyhow, I look at other queer men that I distantly watch through social media or random and distant crossing of paths, and I can’t help but be impressed at their openness, their virility. The way they did not flee, but learned to navigate their queerness within an extremely hostile environment, and the way their existence proofs it is possible, and fruitful -- I can only assume they are satisfied with their lives in as far as anyone can be.
I get the feeling that I never learned to grow that thick of a skin, that being back home - if I were to try and enter that community there - I would become the odd one out. The one who can barely let his guard and filters down within an extremely supportive environment, the one who falters and cringes at any display of queerness within a rural context.
I’m squirmish about my identity.
Anyways I posted a story asking people - if they are out there - if they want to talk with me about their experience being gay/queer around the Waldviertel, and if they stayed there how they are navigating it, I want to see it from the other side basically. What they think of people who ran away.
One person replied for now, I am still hesitant to reach out to anyone directly although some people come to mind. Maybe I should just shoot them a dm or voicenote.
Another note on the process, I get the feeling I am losing my initial drive a bit. Which is sad truly. I keep thinking of outcomes and finals deliverables something I have successfully fought off - which is a miracle in itself I would argue.
The following will be an attempt at a self-directed pep-talk.
I am allowing the project to keep shifting. I am allowing it time and space to grow. I am allowing my intuition to keep directing me places. I want to be excited again about what I am doing, not laborous.
I am doing all this planning now and its feeling boring. I guess boring is the wrong word but it feels like there is two ways this could go - or more directly - Planning allows this project to grow. To abide by standards of expectations. “If you are filming somehting it has to look polished, you have to have a team, you have to have a strict plan,...” I guess part of me tries to figure out how much of this planning enables the project to gow into what it could be, and how much of it is sabotaging my process and intentions.
And the terrible thing is refuting this planning feels like laziness in a lot of ways. And laziness makes me sad. The feeling of it does.
Trying to recenter this idea. Perceived dissonance with hof I navigate my own queer identity in the city vs on the countryside.
What I want to share further is that looking for identity by stripping away at your own matter (personal history and positionality) might not be a fruitful endeavour. Identity is what we perform within the moment and queer theory tells us that a queer performance creates dissonance in a straight world and thus forces said straight world to consider their own performativity (a fact that they have become blind to for always following the heteronormative creases evident in society.)
I want this display of queer performance to be playful, light, joyous. entering resubjectification not through trauma (which would follow this idea of excavating a true identity through removing layers of trauma), but rather accepting the subjectification through insult (vgl. Didier Eribon) and still chosing to move past it. Taking control oneself.
Ruinology gives me the tools necessary to reappropriate this insult, framing it not as a loss but as procedd of environmental information being imprinted onto a subject. A gain of information, something positive to be examined. Further the fabulation of missing pieces of our identities can reshape whatever is a given, draping our whole identity in new fabrics.
It is saying yes I am shaped by my past experience, but given the present moment, the only temporality my identity becomes tangible in, I have the agency to perform freely, in turn shaping my entire narrative, outside of chronology.
And the freedom of performance is subject to norms and safety precautions, figuring out to what extent I can do so in which social bubbles? (eh unsure)
I am thinking I should write a script. But again also unsure if I want to be that didactic. But I can just be for now and see how it feels. Thats the whole point. Nothing is set in stone.