Touch-Cabinet

7^th of December

I have decided to donate the Cabinet to the Museum for various reasons .

I feel the need to make a strong statement. This cannot be made in a few weeks. The Touch Cabinet is a symbol for the advocacy of more tactile interaction in the museum. I have informed the workers in the museum, so that, long after I am gone , they will be able to explain to the visitors what the meaning is. It is also an organic project;I explained that the cabinet is a vehicle for other interesting objects, which visitors can put in the drawers, taking out the existing artefacts.(swap one artefact for a new one ? ) This way the Cabinet will always be new and exciting. The project is about tactility and interaction. Having an experience in the museum, rather than just observing.

In order to explain the idea in a tactile way, I have asked Mark, the carpenter to make a miniature version , which I can bring back to Northern Ireland, for the exhibition there. I will bring one object, made by Francis ,back , in order to preserve continuation with the African artefacts. I will also bring the baboon head, since the creation of this is part of the footage I will be shown.

When I told the two girls who work in the museum that the Cabinet is a donation, they spontaneously burst out in a dance, which is , in a fluke of serendipity, captured on film.

KWA-TA-KO

Last week I wrote about communication with the Ugandans.The fact that i am never able to shed my skin. Hand it in for a black one for a while. or my voice for that matter. Never will I be able to speak with an Ugandan accent, nor would I want to. It is bad enough to have a Dutch accent, which goes unnoticed here. Dat dan weer wel. But here I was, filming and standing with the three young men who will accompany me to the Museum tomorrow, ( For the observant reader, yes it has been a day delayed ). Francis, Julius and Godwin, and we were talking like  old friends. We were joking, organizing the event tomorrow, being supportive of each other, and learning each others language. That is  how I got to know that' Kwa-ta-ko' means Touch in Luganda.
There is something Touching about learning each others language. I was able to say : 'We-ba-le' Julius ! for carrying my heavy computer, and my bag, and offering me a drink of water. I was able to say' Gye-ba-le 'Godwin ! for making a perfectly smooth coffeecup. We were standing at the back of the college, in front of the kiln.chickens were roaming and laying eggs underneath the rusty bedsframes, which were about to be thrown out, although, that might take another couple of yearsThe clay was slowly forming under the young artists hands. I asked them to speak Luganda, and it sounded like a long and hypnotizing song. Days pass very quickly here, and when mothers bring their children to bed, they whisper Su-la-bu-lu-ngi, little one...

Bleak

5^th of December,

I just visited the school again this morning. The way the college is functioning at the moment, the prospects are very bleak. I need a narrative. From the students, from the school, from Uganda, From Africa. And no sooner as I have written this down, I want to retract it again; Ultimately the masters project is about touch. The awareness of Touch. Conscious touch. The immediacy of Touch. And getting side tracked by the fact that research is taken place in Africa. Yet, it is impossible to by pass the fact that things are here so radically different. That, in my Western opinion, there is so much need. The students live and work like caterpillars, and with a little change, a little help, they could live and study and work like butterflies. I was reading an interesting article by Tanya Harrods, (Crafts Magazine June-July 2011 ), who was writing about a phenomena called : 'Maker Fares '.

These are creative fairs, where people not consume, but create . This has been happening in Europe , America, and, with a different twist, in Africa. Emeka Okafor, a leading Anglo- African thinker ,set out his aim to to create a 'maker philosophy' in Africa. On the 2010 Nairobi Faire, sixty young men and women were featured on 'Makers faire African's match -a- maker scheme., which aims to pair young innovators with venture capitalists. Perhaps this has not so much to do with touch. It is about being touched by an situation, and looking for possibilities for improvement.

Touch is about being touched by a situation and looking for possibilities for improvement. Touch is about not looking at things from a distance, not just listening or smelling, not just eating the matoke,

but engage, not just with an object, a person even, but with a situation, and become aware of the weight and shape of it, and make it part of your own experience ,before handing it back. To speak with Sennett, ' Presence can be registered simply by leaving a maker's mark'.

Perhaps, on my journey through Touch, this is the biggest lesson I have learned ; That Touch signifies immediate involvement. Looking is a passive act. Listening is untouchable. Taste possibly comes close to Touch , because to taste, one has to touch, but in a way this means taste is a secondary sense, and scent is equally untouchable, although this provokes the strongest memory.

Touch is the only sense which can also be applied to the heart, and therefore makes it the most precious of the senses.

Anthropomorphosis

I was just wondering, on the exhibition TOUCH , which will be displaying the objects made by this students, will it be interesting enough for the audience to touch objects which are only made last week,by art students in a relatively short time, and look like objects which can be bought in any random souvenir shop ?

I believe the important thing here is, that we can create a narrative;Most of the objects are made of rich African soil, I travelled thousands of miles to do the Touch Project, the students will be there. The story of the Michelangelo students and my own narrative will become interwoven, and therefore one.

I will need to gather some background information from the students for the exhibition in Belfast :

With their intriguing African names, their lives in the villages, their expectations of the future, and their family narrative, it will become a truly interesting exhibition !) How then becomes a material inviting enough for the artist? Sennet, has some thoughts on what makes an object interesting, not only for the viewer, but also , and especially for the maker:'All his or her efforts to do good quality work depend on curiosity of the material in hand. 'He then goes on to say that: 'we become particularly interested in the things we can change.' He calls the three issues : Metamorphoses, presence and anthropomorphosis .

Metamorphosis :this can be direct as a change of procedures, as when potters switch from moulding clay on a fixed platter to building it up on a rotating wheel.

Presence can be registered simply by leaving a maker's mark, such as a brick maker’s stamp .

Anthropomorphosis : occurs when we impute human qualities to a raw material;supposedly primitive cultures imagine that spirits dwell in a tree, and so in a spear from it's wood ;sophisticates personalize materials when using words like 'sympathetic' , or modest to describe finishing details on a cabinet. (Sennet, R. , 2008, p. 120 )

Sennet on Craft

30^th of November

I just found a the perfect text to accompany my exhibition in Belfast ! My idea of showing a movie with crafters working in clay, transforming a lump of clay into a beautiful object, as the ultimate touch display , but also relating to craft :

'Richard Sennet writes in his book : The Crafter : 'It taxes the powers of the most professional writer to describe exactly how to tie a slipknot (and it is certainly beyond mine). Here is a , perhaps the,

fundamental human limit: Language is not an adequate ''mirror-tool'' for the physical movements of the human body. ( ) One solution to the limits of language is to substitute the image for the word. The many plates , by many hands that richly furnish the encyclopedia made this assist for workers unable to explain themselves in words , and in a particular way. In illustrations of glass blowing, for instance, each stage of blowing a glass bottle appears in a separate image ; all the junk in the workshop has been illuminated , and the viewer focuses on just what hands and mouth need to do at this moment to transform the molten liquid into a bottle. ( In my case this would be the clay bulk into an sculpture ). The images, in other words, illuminate by clarifying and simplifying movement into a series of clear pictures of the sort the photographer Henri Cartier -Bresson called' decisive moments'.

He continues to say that : 'It might be possible to imagine an experience of enlightenment strictly as a visual experience following this photographic procedure, one that enables our eyes to do the thinking about material things . In silence , as in a monastery , communication among people would be reduced to a minimum for the sake of contemplating how an object is made.

Zen- Buddhism follows this non verbal path , taking the craftsman to be an emblematic figure who enlightens by showing rather than telling.'

This text, (The Craftsman, p. 95 ) I would like to be blown up in a big text in proximity of the film shown, perhaps even on the outside of the space where the film is going to be seen..

Pepernoten

December, 1^st

I can not believe it is already the first of December ! It is surreal, sitting here on the verandah, in the tropical heat, surrounded by yellow flowers of the acacias, and the sound of tropical birds, which I have got to know over the months I have been here, knowing that in a few weeks time we I will be back in Europe, celebrating Christmas with everybody!!!

So much has to happen before that time !!! The Dissertation, which weighs heavy on my mind,will be finished. On Monday, Dec. 5^th, in stead of eating 'pepernoten' and celebrating the feast of the Holy Saint Nicolaas, which is tradition in Holland, I will be preparing the exhibition in the Kampala Museum . The Touch -Cabinet is finished, apart from the last layer of varnish, and I will be able to collect it tomorrow. So exciting !!!All I have to do is line the drawers with interesting African Material. Batik is not African, but originally Indonesian, in spite of being also called 'Dutch Wax-printed cloth. Shonibare is an African-British artist who uses this as an key-material. The cloth was brought into Africa , where it was adopted and, consequently reclaimed as being 'African fabrics'.

It then found its way back into Europe. I think this is an interesting example of 'material diaspora'!!!

Tomorrow I will also revisit the school , to pick up the fired clay-pieces, hoping that they all survived the process, and to check on the students ,to see what the produced posters look like. I will then also arrange the time to meet up with the small group of people who will be assisting me at the event. It all seems to be coming together !!!

coffin for sale

Could I ever live in Africa ?My life is so radically different here than back home ; I don't drive here, and i really miss that independence. My only retail therapy here is going to the local supermarket once a week. Greedily i look at packets of soup, plastic containers, bone dry buns.I want to dye my hair, but only if I want to change it to jet black, I could . When I carefully choose some biscuits and cheese, I already know they will be a dissapointment .Everything is just not what you expect it to be; things are out of date, or packed in the wrong box, like lightbulbs so you arrive home with a bajonet fitting, ofcourse what you needed was a screw fitting.So you read with a torch until the next supermarket treat. And you know what ? You dont bother anymore with looking for the right things. Defeat sets in, and you just manage with what you have got. Your eyes register the rubbish piles, with children playing in it. The Boda Boda's , the local taxi mopeds with five , sometimes six people on it, settees, twenty life chicken in a basket.They weave in and out the crazy traffic, their ballast moving along with them. I have stopped holding my breath. The signs with' Coffin for sale', or' Jesus Saves hairsalon.'among the hundreds of street stalls, where naked children play with a rejected weaversbird nest.The markets are full of second hand western clothes, the buthers display chunks of bloody meat, covered in flies outside.their little wooden shacks. And here is the crazy thing : We , Mzungus,the white people, shop in the local butcher, which is huge, sells the most excellent steaks and french cheeses, fresh roses from the local Dutch nursery, and on saturdaymorning  wonderful French almond croissants , driven in , probably on a Boda Boda, all the way from Kampala. If there is a birthday party, everybody within the ex-pat community knows that The Serena Hotel sells the best chocolate cakes on the planet.
The prostitution of snakes and monkeys, the small rocky beaches around Lake Victoria, the chips with your omelette for breakfast,belong to a different world. The world of Africa. And I ? I am merily a visitor, will never belong. I will always be white. When I moved to Ireland, all those years ago, it was difficult at first, to fit in, but at least people didnt stare at me. Once a Mzungu, always a Mzungu.see for previous blogs also http://teatraveltien.blogspot.com