Saturday, November 1

All Saints Day. Or as it might be better described here, All Closed Day. A day when you need to have previously done your shopping, your banking, your everything, because you aren't gonna get it done today, that's for sure. Good day to spend some time working on projects....

Sunday, November 2

After more than five weeks, I've gained some valuable long-term perspective on daily life here. Such as? The public water fountains which spew water into the streets day and night without end are truly institutional rather than a convenience. A small construction project has kept one building near our apartment behind a wall of scaffolding (or maybe it's just undergoing a decades-long restoration, as are so many other things around here). Behind the scaffolding, on a sidewalk which has been taken apart and is completely inaccessible, a drinking fountain has continually poured water across the construction zone and into the street, day and night, regardless of the fact that no one could possibly make use of the fountain in its current situation. Like I said before, it appears that there is in fact no way to shut off the public presentation of water even if it were necessary to do so. Senatus Populusque Romanus!

Monday, November 3

The Week In Preview goes thusly: Get ready to open up a can of Liminal Project crits, 'cause time is short and we're hittin' the road. Florence and Siena await, so chop-chop. Did we all notice that as of the end of the Halloween party, the academic quarter is now officially half-over?

OK, here's schoolwork in yer eye. The idea of the Liminal States project was to create something which showed our relationship to our previous lives in the US and our present lives in Italy, and how we managed (or not) to reconcile the two. I took an Italian-language newspaper, slicing and dicing it together with an English-language paper in various ways, in order to make it as difficult for a native Roman to understand it as it was for me.

• My "Artist's Statement", for the critique of November 3, which accompanied the work I created for the Liminal Project.
• Images of the work itself:
  1. Front page of the paper. (111 KB .JPG)
  2. A Chart detailing, er, something about a crime probably, which I erased and obscured so as to reduce it to photos and symbols. (32 KB)
  3. Two pages of the paper, cut up and woven together. (104 KB)
  4. A shredded article, perhaps a commentary, with an interesting icon at the top. (81 KB)
• Notes taken (by another student) regarding other students' reaction to and thoughts on my work. The idea behind having another student take notes during the critique of your own work is to assist clarity and objectivity, but I found the task of deciphering someone else's handwriting to be equally arduous...
• Notes I took for myself during the critique of other students' works, including a short description of the work when possible.