Navdanya is a farm, a place of knowledge, of learning and experience the kind you acquire through working with other people and listening to their experiences. I decided to have a few conversations with people I learned a lot from when I was there.
If you want to know more about Navdanya there is this great blog http://francescamoore.wordpress.com/2012/12/25/navdanya-2/ and obviously the Navdanya website http://www.navdanya.org/home where you can get it all.
Sorry for the chaos of images, I’m trying to work out how to add a slideshow to my post through my WordPress app on my phone.
Not very successful, hey?
Well, enjoy the images of Jodhpur’s Fort in the meantime. More to follow.
Delhi seems to be a city of rooftops, ladders and stairs, washing lines and unfinished stuff. To be honest this isn’t a good representation of Delhi and it’s chaos, maybe just a bit of rest for my senses first of all.
These are some pictures of my travels North from Mumbai to Delhi. There are a lot of hours (precisely twenty-eight) in that trip and a lot of landscape goes by. While I was looking out of the window I started thinking about light. In India there is a lot of this as well. But sometimes it is necessary to choose which light one is more interested the outside or the inside light.
What is the important subject? I will be a bit lazy today and leave that choice to you.
© Lorenza Ippolito
I’ve just arrived in Mumbai and still a bit jet-lagged, trying to figure out where the pavement is and where the street.
These are my first impressions who knows what will come. Hope I’ll be able to update the blog soon as the internet connection is a bit patchy.
When I went to Italy this October just before my imminent trip to India, my dad pulled out of his bag-from-the-past an object that really surprised me, just when I was starting to think my parents could no longer surprise me.
After a customary huge meal, my dad put on the table a bizarre skull-cap with sown on floral decorations, a baffling pattern describable as a blooming Alpine-Judaic mixture. Was this the time for big family revelations? Were we the only remaining survivors of forgotten Alpine Hebrew descendants?
While my fantasies evidently roamed freely in my head, my dad gives me a brief, but truly touching explanation.
He says with a childlike smile “I want you to have this for your trip to India. My mother used to put it on my head when we walked the Alps.”
My Grandmother’s family relocated in South Tyrol after the war. Her family was exiled from their native Rijeka in the Istrian Peninsula. My Grandmother loved the Alps, although a bit bitter about the exiled bit, my dad a bit less.
And so I shall take it with me to India.
The Exhibition has come down and I am now in Italy for the first time in 10 months. It feels good to be back, but also to take some time to look at Moving Boundaries from a distance.
Since July a lot has been done, video and audio training, organising Talking to the Screen Workshop, editing the footage, reading up on new media, and now time to sit back and understand what it is that really makes me tick.
So now that I have had a little time to concentrate on where I want my practice to go and where to direct my energy, I thinking about my exhibition. I feel that the strongest elements were the digital ones and the participatory aspects too. On the other hand, I feel that the 3 photographic pieces were still interesting, but that the scale of some was exaggerated and that the participatory element was not as engaging as it could have been.
Untitled (Conversation II), an ipad piece in a wooden frame attached to the wall is an interesting mixture of digital technology and organic materials. In this piece I edit still images to convey a story, more precisely, manipulate the images to give the sense of a narrative.
The final piece which is untitled is a documentary of Talking to the Screen which was an informal discussion workshop to converse about older audiences and the politics of technology. In this video piece I was trying to convey the conversation as it happened and give a voice to all the participants. I feel that the art here is the interaction of the people. Underlining the uniqueness of every conversation and the importance of people physically occupying a space and interacting.
This image of mine has been picture of the week on the AA2A website. It is part of a moving image work in progress I have been working on during my residency at Nottingham Trent University.
Please forgive the quality of the picture, even though I kinda like it’s gritty colour-casted quality.
So, what’s it about? I am preparing to apply for an Arts Council’s Grant for the Arts. This is my initial mind chart to which I will be adding ideas and concept during week.
I am applying specifically for support towards researching and developing my conversations project of which Bologna Portraits is part.
Alison Lloyd, my mentor at the AA2A residency at Nottingham Trent University will be giving me a hand and I hope to get some support from Fabrica as well.
Let you know more about the project very soon. Enjoy the Working Progress in the meantime.
Learning Curves 