Author: Bruna Araujo Pereira

See, you got do stuff till you gotta go sleep at night.
Cause the glory is… is in you

I go back to the album A Seat at the Table (Apple Music, Spotify) every now and then when I need to reconnect with myself. When I first stumbled upon the album, though, I thought that I was only projecting my life onto Solange’s words. But somehow, around four years later, their meaning has been slightly shifting over time only to eventually achieve their final effect: bring me peace. I feel like the songs have become part of me. Or maybe I am still projecting. 

And we have to show them the evolution of where we come from.
I'm about to send a message to the world, like...

One of the main things that attracts me to A Seat at the Table is that I don’t understand it completely. Solange’s way of prolonging syllables and merging her voice with the melody, as well as the metaphors, make the songs quite opaque. That was especially relevant for C1-Level-English-learner-16-year-old me who struggled to comprehend R&B lyrics in general. However, over time, my playing of the “English is my second language” card did not make sense anymore, and only now I realize that, instead, the problem is that it took me many months to finally read the songs’ lyrics. In a very unusual fashion for me, I enjoyed the songs without the need to know every exact word. Perhaps that is not surprising at all in this case because, as I mentioned before, Solange’s songs are about the melody, where hearing eighty percent of the lyrics and ninety percent of the (many) instruments will certainly do the job. And by “job” I mean: completely immersing myself in a semi-meditative state for forty minutes. 

One of the funny consequences of this ambiguity is that in almost every listening I learn something new. Just today, as I was reviewing the album for this essay, I realized that the chorus of “Don’t You Wait” is, as the name suggests, “Don’t you wait for me,” and not “Don’t you wake up me.” I know that my years-old interpretation does not even make sense on a grammatical level, but I guess I connected the sleep-like ambience of the song to its meaning. This dreamy melody, that is present in much of the album, interacts with self-reflective themes to create an internal monologue that is very easy to relate to. I feel it when Solange sings: 

I traveled 70 states
Thought moving 'round make me feel better

I tried to let go my lover
Thought if I was alone then maybe I could recover
To write it away or cry it away (don't you cry, baby)
Away

“Cranes in the Sky,” which is my favorite song of the album, reminds me that I am not the only one making weird decisions like moving to another country at 18 to run away from the real or imaginary metal clouds.

In this album, Solange sings about confusion, self-doubt, fear, isolation, and mistakes – things that I find hard to articulate myself, but that become a bit easier to reflect upon once merged into a nice composition.

My grandfather, he said, 'Why you gon' call it "No Limit"?" 
I said, "Because I don't have no limit to what I could do."

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Songs cited:

1. Interlude: The Glory is in You
2. Interlude: This Moment
3. Cranes in the Sky
4. Interlude: No Limits

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I also wanted to discuss the aspect of race that permeates most of the album, but unfortunately I already reached the word count. The songs “Mad,” “…Don’t Touch My Hair,” and “F.U.B.U.” are great in that sense. I resonate I lot with them even though my experience is very different from that of a Black American woman. I think she sings beautifully about the indescribable sensation of being stigmatized on whatever basis, like race or gender.

Possible ways to organize the exhibition

• Multiple themes, each one of us signs up individually or as a group to one of themes
• Choose a single theme and each one of us responds individually.

Project ideas

• 1. We choose a song for a specific number of places in the city; 2. We record ourselves walking around each area with a microphone; 3. We increase the sound of the songs (at the installation) as the noise in their corresponding place increases, as captured by the microphones
• Ring that you can touch to feel the soundwaves of the space
• Video art: record transportation sound (no talking, human sounds) and collage it with color graded visuals in reference to a specific feeling/location/sound amplitude

Possible themes/prompts

• Self/body: what would your daily life say about you? Create moodboards, descriptive autobiographies (e.g. instead of a narrative, write about what you did on a day), food. Reference: Nia’s project about receipts
• Sound: turn sound into something else
• Studio visits: create something based on a studio visit (ideas that came up, response to one of their works…), including the subjective journey of visiting them (e.g. transportation, weather, feelings)
• Public transportation
• The city, an area, a place

Ephemeral Tomorrow Collective

It took me a while to get excited about the presentation as I wish he would talk more about the concepts, like explained on their website, and less about the technicalities behind each piece. However, after his discussions of a few works I could see the line of thought, and the themes became really interesting to me. I enjoyed their focus on laser pointer as a medium, and his explanation of the different interactions between laser and environment gave ma inspiration for new ideas.

Lateral Thinking Chapter 9

De Bono’s description of how we often use judgment too much reminded me of Paulo Freire, a very prominent Brazilian educator. He argued that education at schools should remove the professor-student hierarchy as much as possible, and nurture a space where both are allowed to grow, therefore, make mistakes. Indeed I think that I have learned the most with teachers/professors who actually listened to what I had to say – even if it was wrong – and were open to also learning with me. Of course, as De Bono pointed out, vertical thinking and judgment are important aspects of learning, but I definitely see a use in adopting more lateral thinking in part of our school curriculum.

Art & Fear Chapter 1

I really identified with the author and it was funny to realize how much we (especially artists) romanticize the artistic crafts, even if rationally we believe that artists are not inherently special. I remember some semesters ago when I decided to call myself an “artist” and how difficult it was to say it. I had been making art for many years, and it eventually became my “passion,” so why should it be hard? I am still figuring out how this “label” translates into my life – perhaps it’s not important at all. Anyway it was interesting to be challenged by the book’s call to reality.

Little noises

I recorded noises that I noticed throughout the day, but that were relatively low or unique in comparison to what we usually think as overwhelming noise (e.g. cars, running water). I edited the sound tracks trying to resemble the noise of a city traffic, as if the multiple agents and sources of noise were interacting within the same environment.

field.io

This was my favorite visit so far. Something that I found particularly interesting was their description of a “visual anchor” in a creative process:

precise information (e.g. algorithms) -> visual representation (basic ‘structure’ of the algorithm in blocks -> abstraction based on artistic and not so much scientific decisions.

This sounds like a useful framework for future artworks.

Bruna, Haya, Natty

For our project, we decided to design a magazine based on apples called “Apple Daily”. In this magazine, we presented each of our works, the watercolor painting presented by Bruna, a comic done by Natty, and the Recipe to Success done by Haya. 

In Natty’s comic, he created a light-hearted comic based on the adventures between a talking apple and a knife, which it takes a dark turn towards the end. It aims to attract attention to the readers of Apple Daily and provide them with a sense of humor throughout the day. 

In Haya’s infographic, it provides you with the key steps to creating a successful Apple business and factory. The infographic gives you key tips and tricks to stay on top of your game, such as providing the best quality of apples, gaining customers, and becoming a success.

Bruna was inspired by the way in which a recipe book, as well as the act of cooking in itself, often evokes connections to female relatives in our earliest memories. Relating this nourishing memories to the traditional conditioning of women as domestic laborers, she created a watercolor panel of textures that stem from snapshots of her own body. “Pinch of Love” attempts to turn the (female) body into a main ingredient of our women-centered food memories. It is both as an embracing of those times, as well as as a criticism to their underlying sexism.

My first idea wast to walk around the city and come up with “why” questions again. However, I decided to make my journey a project in itself.

I printed a map of Berlin and followed a semi-random path. I stopped a few times along the way to draw my pathway on the map and write down notes about the process. I took the subway from the Berlin Gate to the other side of the city, in Frankfurter Allee, and then another metro back home after walking around that neighborhood. The whole exercise took around 4h30min.

I documented everthing on a Dayry (day+diary): Link

talk with robert seidel

• adaptability + scalable work
• audience smarter than we think – no need to necessarily dumb-down
• question: themes, colors, shapes, story (e.g. sound) – how to decide? – does he create a sensation? why is it usually unsettling?
• art that makes you want to move – not appreciated by curators/institutions apparently
• multisensorial – easier to remember
• mystery around the artist’s methods and thought process + unpredictability = what makes art cool?

The chapter made me wonder what is the role of ego in all of the construction and reconstruction of mind patterns. The tendency of the brain to retrieve information that is similar to  what has been stored before explains things like confirmation bias. But why is it so hard to accept that our previous pattern (e.g. opinion) is not useful or trustworthy anymore? Why is it hard to accept how limited our brain system can be? Perhaps it would be interesting to expand the discussion to the limitations of our personality in itself.