Friends: Wei-Ning Yang

Wei-Ning is a Taiwanese girl who has been living in Milan the past two years, she is currently doing the Visual arts and curatorial program at NABA with me and part of my group of friends that I call family here. Apart from having admirable style and knowing where to find shoes for cheap, she is also a very talented artist who experiments with video, print and illustration. I am hoping to show some more of her work, but here is some postcards that she made based on one of her videos. As friends she gave each a few as gifts.  These scans do not seem to capture how wonderful they are. 

"Monument" a few days later

The thing about making public sculpture is that you are sure that someone will vandalise it. In our case we expected it to last only day. So of course I felt delighted to see the sunglasses  a few days later lying there like an old carcass.  

'Monument'

 by Edna Gee, Leah Corra Messersmith and Edith Poirier.

So finally after a few months of trying to find dates to work and so forth we have managed to finish this work.

This idea came out of workshop done with Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas at NABA where we were asked to work within the neighbourhood Ticinese in Milano. We were confronted with the idea of public sculptures which relates to collective memories of neighbourhoods. Ticinese today however is more of a passersby street then a socially interactive neighbourhood, or at least that is how we as foreign students relate to it. We all live around this area which connects us with the centre.  One of the things one sees  when passing through this neighbourhood is not a strong political inclination, but trendy people and street vendors selling these colourful sunglasses.  A lot of people here wear sunglasses, even inside.

These sunglasses are more or less 3 x 2 metres (slightly smaller) and are made out of plastic, cardboard, scotch tape and some wooden sticks to reinforce the structure. The cardboard we got from the local supermarket for which we did not pay a cent. Our biggest expenditure was the scotch tape. So here we have it a new monument for the neighbourhood, one which is held together by scotch tape. Come to think of it a lot of things here in Milano seem to be held together by scotch tape maybe that is why scotch tape is so expensive ;)

The process of us carrying the structure from NABA towards Piazza 24 Maggio, was almost for me the most wonderful part of the artwork. It turned out 2 people carrying one arm, the other arm by another 2, and 3 people carrying the big frame. We had to walk from Via Darwin all the way through Corso San Gottardo (which is quite a busy street) all the way to the piazza. So people saw first these two curious long arms coming by followed by the big frames – a kind of "what is this? Aha!" moment.

So the whole process was a little haphazard and sometimes difficult with us not having a space to work or money to buy materials (or a natural feel for structural complications) but I am quite happy with the result and the fleetingness of the end.

Thanks to Carlo Spiga, Jessica Rucinque, ZackWood and Mitch Wood for helping us carrying it and assembling it in the piazza.  And thanks to Edith and Leah for the collaboration, I would definitely do it again.

For more image click here.

Artissima 18, Torino

Performance at Artissima for the Mr.Freedom Summit. I will post a little bit more on this soon.