My second week here had me see the tiny shoot of my new pursuit sprout out. Very fresh and mint, I saw tiny ideas surface with either a lawn or a forest, somewhere, within it.
My walks around the city found me strolling into a very large fabric store several times and I bought myself a punch needle, some yarn and a hoop to begin a new tactile ambition. Something that only the brainspace gifted in an artist’s residency would whim with. So unlike my hardened, already set monotony, I had a new hobby, a new way of processing things- through material, through cloth and yarn. Winterthur is very acquainted with wools and yarns and through multiple stores and women I have walked around, I could see the hints of language the city weaved.
I went to meet my mentor here, Nicole Bachmann, in her art studio. Nicole is a textual artist and she drew a lot from how subjectivities shape individual lives. Texts, rants, confessions, all juxtaposed on each other, they all created a symphony of Nicole’s chaos on canvas. I took a seminar on collectivity and communities at the University of the Art Zurich, trying to learn the academic discourse about ‘collectivity’, the emergent theme in all our global and local discourses. I went to the opening night of Laura Bielau’s photography exhibition at the Coalmine, curated by Annette Amberg, a photographer and curator and met a few photography and museum connoisseurs. Lastly, I also went to another exhibition by Sam Porritt, a space installation artist based out of Zurich. All diverse practices and discourses, I felt very connected to the larger question that art asks, the artist asks: What more is there to see? what else can I see and learn?
The vintage flea market that I saw in Winterthur, it had youngsters and grandparents on each stall, selling off vintage or pre-loved things from their homes and I felt it was such a good exercise for families, with young children urging the older generations to let go of some stuff and how they must have complied, rather reluctantly. As I sat on my desk, thinking about the contours of my project on intergenerational silence between women in families, I felt that it helped me see this market as a spectacle of that dialogue- that was needed, that could have been, that should have been. I felt like this market was an affirmative response to the questions I had hoped to ask.
