Some more Moley adventures for Lily and Amelie...
A few wee observations from Moley and I as we've been a-wandering in Santiago:
- Beware crossing the roads, even when there's a green man on the lights drivers turn into the roads
- Carry plenty tissues - your nose gets blocked up, according to the guidebook this is because of pollution
- If you're a woman celebrate bras as useful laundry tools in combination with balconies and sunshine, you can secure bigger items such as dresses to the balcony using them as giant clothes pegs and your clothes'll be dry in a day :-)
- Empanadas are a great cheap option for a meal (the cheapest I saw were 2 big'uns for 1,100 pesos = £1.55 ish) These pastry pockets are most similar to a Cornish pasty, filled with various tasty combinations of meat and cheese.
- If you're very VERY hungry try a "Pastel de choclo". This was Karen's suggestion for a typical local dish most common in these summer months when there's plenty of corn around. The best way to describe it is as a Moroccan tagine mixed into a British cottage pie, it's a mixture of minced beef and chicken, egg, olives, raisons topped with cheesy corn mash... que rico!
- If you are into juggling or capoeria there are plenty of green spaces to play around in, we spotted a good few folk playing, especially in Parque Forrestal, including a pair of girls with one trapeze and another couple of girls with a tightrope strung between two trees, reminding me of playing with V in El Retiro in Guatemala.
- For a great view of the city talk a wander up the small hill Cerro Santa Lucía, this is also a good opportunity to try the Mote con Huesillos (the wheat and peach drink that I wasn't so struck by).
- If you are into juggling or capoeria there are plenty of green spaces to play around in, we spotted a good few folk playing, especially in Parque Forrestal, including a pair of girls with one trapeze and another couple of girls with a tightrope strung between two trees, reminding me of playing with V in El Retiro in Guatemala.
- For a great view of the city talk a wander up the small hill Cerro Santa Lucía, this is also a good opportunity to try the Mote con Huesillos (the wheat and peach drink that I wasn't so struck by).
At El Museo de Arte Popular Americano the exhibition Fondart 2012 Quinchamal explained the elaborate processes involved in making the painted wooden figures with the giant bulbous bases.
At El Museo de Arte Contemporeano there were two amazing exhibitions that also felt personally very useful when thinking about my own artwork. One was a retrospective of Chilean painter and muralist Guillermo Brozález, which showed his process of taking a sketch through colour planning initially with block colour to the final mural (example above).
Another was "La Búsquedad de la Felicidad" (Search for Happiness) from artist Kadir van Lohuizen. The exhibition presented the stories of migrants, their families and the local industries that van Lohuizen encountered on his year long journey along the Pan American Highway from the Southernmost extreme Puerto Toro in Chile to the northernmost extreme of Deadhorse, Alaska. The work was displayed as a series of huge photographic prints and a documentary style video split across 4 screens using a mixture of still photography, video footage, text and with a soundtrack of recorded sound and a narrated voice track.
Reflecting back to my very amateur photo montage video of my time in Scotland I am keen to experiment more with film and photo montage documentation in this journey. I'm particularly thinking about documenting folk working and creating in the streets, such as artisans, street performers and musicians. I'll be particularly interested to focus on the hands and their hand-made processes (thinking back to the beauty of Lara and Marina's videos on the And'Art residency that so inspired me!)
At this point of my journey, looking forward to the Villa Alegre residency, I feel like I am waiting in my own artwork, sort of teetering on the tip of a precipice about to plunge into making, experimenting and creating. I really hope that I find the confidence in me to start to talk to the makers in the street, I am sure I will at the right moment and once I'm started I imagine it will roll on easily (I hope!). After the plait image that I started on the plane and finished in the sunshine of Santiago I had a dream about plaits and circles, and the image below developed from that.
Perhaps it says something about my dreams and hopes for the different but connected pools of this upcoming journey - the art workshops with the children I will work with at Meninadança in Brazil, my own artwork on the road and on the residency in Villa Allegre, and perhaps others.
Am feeling so excited and full of energy and hope! Yay! Big love ;-)
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