Residency at the Cité

Mati and I have an artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris this May and June.

Our project is vague. I mean, I figure that is ok, since the point is to develop the project during the residency and it will take more form between now and then and during then and after then.

Shall I copy and paste the proposal (in French)? Why the hell not:

Nous avons tous les deux un fort intérêt pour la communication et les méthodes de communication. Nous allons confronter nos idées et notre vision sur la perception et la réalité de la communication. En étudiant la façon dont les couples internationaux (c'est-à-dire les couples qui sont originaires de différents pays) surmontent la difficulté d'une communication simple et / ou des questions culturelles, notre idée n'est pas nécessairement de faire un documentaire, mais d'obtenir plein d'informations sur ce sujet à partir desquels nous pourrons construire notre exposition de retour à Santiago.

En outre, nous avons l'accord d'un couple, franco-américain (ayant des racines cubaines et mexicaines),qui vit actuellement à Paris.

This couple I speak of in the proposal, they don't really know that we are going to "study" them, and, honestly, I haven't decided if we should tell them or not (they are, obviously, friends of mine).

So, as vague as it is, we have started a blog (you can either click on the link on the left side panel or just click on the word blog - the latter or the former). Need I repeat that the project is in its infancy? Probably not, I have been pretty redundant about that - perhaps I am feeling inadequate. Oh well. Or should I say: tant pis.

The flights haven't been bought yet, but soon, yes soon. The residency is slated for May 3rd - June 28th. Ah, Paris in the springtime...

I no us preocupáis, esperem fer un viatge cap a BCN. Només cal treure una raó del no-res, vull dir una raó per "treball" és a dir del projecte. (Yes, google translate had to help me. Damn my català is so rusty, sigh)

3:34 am

I never really imagined what an earthquake was like. In fact, it took me a while to figure out exactly what was going on, with the blue glow of the moon through the bedroom windows, watching my house dance as if we were on a boat during a storm.

Mati was telling me - put on some shoes - get dressed - go outside. With no lights it was hard to find clothes and shoes. I ended up with a dress on over my pj's and Mati found a pair of my shoes for me.
I took the dog and just stood there on the sidewalk trembling, and kinda cold too. I watched as people popped out of their houses. The older lady next door stood on her doorstep smoking a cigarette. Eventually Mati found the flashlight and had surveyed the - lack of - damage in the house and joined me outside.
Sitting there I noticed the layer of dust, from the ground to above the roofs.

I immediately went inside to grab the cameras.

I never got a picture of the dust because I was too busy trying to document the fallen and sprawled things in the house.

Around 6am we fell back asleep. I remember asking Matías what magnitude he thought that was, he said 6. A friend called at 10am. That was when we found out it was an 8 or greater. We immediately got up and turned on the news.

As cliché as it is, the terremoto (earthquake in Spanish, just the sound of the word is fitting) has made me realize the more important things in life.

And seeing as we have now returned to life as it was before (minus a few glasses), I can't help but feel guilty (perhaps that isn't the right word to describe the emotion): this has been quite devastating for so many people, even here in Santiago, and we walk away with barely a scratch.

We watch the news the same as my friends and family in other countries; we gape at the horrible devastation. In the afternoon when we take our dog to the park, we walk by piles of rubble on the sidewalk next to buildings that look like nothing has happened, but the piles of bricks and plaster had to come from somewhere. I fail to understand the hardship of so many of the people around me. And that really bothers me.

We have turned off the news (that runs almost 24/7). Are we shutting it out? Going back to our lives trying not to think about those around us? No. It's the news. The images have been fearful and quite sensationalist. Letters by TV executives have been written to the newsrooms deploring them for their coverage over the last week. There was one (actually two shown successively) of a foot and then of a hand, both being torn from the destruction, both from bodies that have since lost their breath. These images put me between crying and vomiting.

The favorite word of newscasters and TV commentators has been "dantesca" (horrific, shocking, gruesome). While the journalist is interviewing people gathering water from the nearby lake in Concepción, because they have no running water - water that they have to boil and then add a few drops of bleach before they can consume it - tells them that this situation is terrible. These journalists are completely irresponsible! Firstly, the public knows that the situation is horrific, that is clear by the un-edited images that are shown. Secondly, the people living through the "dantesca" events know that this is terrible. Your responsibility as a journalist is not to tell them that or sensationalize it to the public more - placing more fear upon the events. Your responsibility is to observe, report, and document - objectively.

Ok. I have gotten off of my high horse. My next post will be about the trials and tribulations of editing a short film - or perhaps something else, but art related, I promise.

By the way, this epidemic of sensationalism in journalism is not Chilean.

Always a work in progress

Statement :

I am an artist, polyglot, promoter of polyglot-ism and creative-ness. Communication and language are vital in my work; they are the impetus. Gesture and perception are concepts that shape it. Hinting at longing and melancholy, my work asks the viewer to question how they perceive. With perception as a key concept, duration consistently carries a lead role in how my work takes form.

Audio-visually, I take leads from Peter Kubelka and Mona Hatoum, among others. Conceptually, anthropologists, cultural academics, and philosophers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Néstor García Canclini, and Alva Nöe give shape and inspiration to my work.

Recently I have been more interested in observation and allowing the story to tell itself rather than inventing characters, scenarios, and plots. I am a firm believer that reality is much more interesting than fiction, but we have to be alert to the stories it tells.

~Nicole Rademacher, February 2010.

The Process of Padding Video

First, thinking back to that summer semester corset-making class in 2003, I lined up all my pieces, and then I went to town and stuffed the section. But, um, to my surprise I made a pillow instead of a section of a cozy.... ah the trials and tribulations that Nicole has making 3-dimensional objects (let us not forget that she is an architecture school drop-out).

No worries. I figured it out, and below is about half of it. Yes, I realize that I started it last week, and, really, I should be done, but I got an invite to go to the beach for the week and enjoy a bit of this thing called summer. So I put all on hold and jumped on the first bus out there!











Documentation and thoughts about impulsive beach trip to come.

video camera snuggly-cozy

I brought my sewing machine down to Santiago with these lofty aspirations of using it. So these last two weeks I have bought some supplies. I have literally broken it out once, but I have been planning - I promise.
My lofty aspirations include: clothes, hand bags, eye blinder things, puff covers, and camera/external hard drive/laptop/ipod bags/sleeves/cozies.
I have been doing research online, looking for the perfect (free) pattern, but they all seem to be very "bag-ish" or how to reconfigure a messenger bag to be a super duper camera bag. But today, I got this amazing idea (insert sarcastic font): why not just make a wrap-like-thing for my camera!!!!
So I measured and decided which panels would be from which fabrics (the scraps) that I bought. Then at the bottom of my (still very small) supply bag, I saw my old socks. And you know me and (trying to) recycle old clothes ... so my next plan of action was to use the sock and make the padding for that - blah blah blah. That was until I tried to fit the camera in the sock. Obviously the thought part of it was profoundly more exciting that the result. Also considering I then realized why they were "old" (notice hole in the toe).
And then after documentation of setback, I realized that my still camera lens hadn't been cleaned in ages.

Well, back to cutting fabric.

Zapatos. cortemetraje por Matías Muñoz Rodriguez

My house has been turned into a production studio.
only for a few weeks.

On entering

It was raw. Raw, but allowed you to enter in. It made me think about a prior piece I was working on - well several actually, that all revolve around the same thing: that story, you know the beautiful one that grinds something deep and fierce in me. Making raw work (or at least this piece) where people can still enter.

Is it enough to allow you to feel, and cringe, when the finger nails scratch slowly down the chalk board?

I want to make you cry with me, and I want to make you feel those deep and beautiful emotions that I feel - the ones that I still can't explain - the ones that are extraordinary and astounding - the ones that rub against each other to produce that spark. I want you to wash yourself in the bathtub and realize who you are. I want you to see yourself in the mirror and have it all make sense. I want you to see a picture and burst into tears. And not stop. I want your tears of confusion to pour down forming puddles on the bathroom floor. I want your wondrous tears to mutate into ones of spectacular joy. 

It was raw, like I said. Life is raw. Raw and crude.

Where do you enter? You enter in the sameness you feel, when the differentness has been broken down, when the exoticism has been surpassed because you know that this person is human too. And you think about your life, and how these events would affect you. You enter when you picture your reactions. You enter when it makes you treasure your own life whether because of the sameness or differentness. You enter when you see yourself  differently. You enter when the contact point has been made.

When you realize that you are not the only one and empathy trumps sympathy, that is when they enter, that is when you enter.