4.12.12

Gracefully Entangled in a Whirlpool of Exchange / 28th Nov.- 2nd Dec. News From Last Week

Dear visible & invisible audience,

the week was filled with extended dreaming sessions entangled with guests (Bram & Roman) and all of the objects some of you have offered us, traveling through various locations inside Ruilen.


Our last dreaming session was prolonged to 2 hours and attempted to include everything there was,
our guests, passers-by visitors, all locations, our collection of objects and the objects that are found in the exhibition, within a dream.

We feel that this dream, that we still don't know to whom does it belong - perhaps to the soul of the frozen white walls inside the empty warehouse - might be a dream of ghosts, exploring the mysterious sensuality that can be found in the absence of social interaction.

We fell in love with the objects you brought us, out of the desire to still feel connected to you, perhaps.
Imagination can offer a short-term replacement of actual human contact.

We endlessly dreamed on the wedding dress, got married, killed, abused, healed and re-harmonized. We become children that found their dolls' hair shaved and cried over some beans. We prayed for the right to dream, while a conference takes place. We hid ourselves in silence and secret, twisted declarations of love.

We sensed each others fragility through a channel where words do not enter and watched our ears open for a voice unknown and not heard before that said: 'Take a walk around the block before deciding to forget your common sense and stay deep inside your own, private, endless ocean'.

Time for Barbie...

On Sunday 2nd Dec. we decided to swap our identities inspired by the 'Barbies for Food' exchange.

We went back to the surface and the easy-going, short encounters with visitors that don't know us.
We felt that the situation had to be re-checked from a new to us perspective. Barbie...

The Barbies-for-Food event was occurring simultaneously with the Art-For-Art exchange, yet the two events, as well as their guests, showed no interest in another. The Barbies were at the entrance and the art at the complete other side of the exhibition while the vast space in-between stayed, in our view, cold and empty.

We spontaneously decided to do nothing else but dress up as Barbies, visit the Art-For-Art, talk to the people there and keep walking back and forth from the Barbie stand to the Art area till something happens. We received some funny looks & smiles, posed for some photos and made two 2 new acquaintances:
Mania or Amy's Whitehouse sister - a painter who offers her paintings in exchange for 2 hours of computer and i-pad help. (Her painting and phone number are left unofficially close to our pink garden.)
and Johannes, a guest of the Art-for-Art exchange, who happened to be hungry and found no food around. Together with Johannes we came up with the idea to suggest a different bargain to the the Barbie owner : offer ourselves as live-size barbies in exchange for some of his food.
Although this action was a little more adventurous than what we thought, we in the end managed to get a  5 degrees (room) temperature Garnalensoep met cocosmelk, that we hope Johannes appreciated.

Next to that, we have as well acquired some new books after exchanging stuff at Ruilen, following the impulses of our new Barbie identity.

We are at the moment preparing for our final week of stay.
We have had lots of conversations and spent time re-evaluating our activity with people involved or not in the exhibition. We would like to thank everyone that spent time with us, offering us their perspective.

We are happy to see that through this project we get a chance to know you and ourselves better.

p.s.
We would like to welcome the cat made of paper, donated by Roman and the torn black fabric with the remains of fluorescent chalk and it's falling pocket attached with a white tape, as well as the cardboard box where it was lying inside and sincerely thank its unknown donor.

* image by Gordon Wilding
(http://www.lewub.com/images.php?id=27)