Transforming the Everyday - Final Piece

For my final project, I decided to use objects that were personal to me and I had a stronger connection to- my own magical objects. I chose to look at the story of my great grandmother, for whom I had great admiration as she, at a young age, crossed the borders of India to Pakistan during the 1947 partition. I was inspired not only by her bravery while going on this journey, the partition being the biggest migration of the 20th century during which thousands lost their lives, but also the strength it must have taken to leave behind her home and all she held dear to start a new life in a different place. Keeping in mind the stories that my great grandmother had told me countless times as a child, I decided to make a suitcase of my own, much like the ones from Willard Mental Asylum, documenting her journey from one country to the other, using the objects she brought with her to tell her story. Some of the objects I used were actually hers whilst others were those that I collected and imagined she would have brought with her. 

However, that didn't quite feel like enough. I wanted the objects to tell their story but I couldn't help but wonder if people who didn't know my great grandmother as I did would understand the story those objects were trying to tell. I wanted to physically bring those objects to life: If they could talk, what would they say? If we could follow their lives, where would they take us? To answer these questions, I decided to use my newly found interest in stop motion animation to create a short video following the life of one of the objects my great grandmother brought with her. The video, together with my suitcase, formed my final piece..

The animation follows the story of one of my great grandmother's possessions,
a steel glass, as it makes it way across borders with her. 

  

When presented, the suitcase was placed as seen above

Although unintentional, I like how the pages aren't quite covering the glass fully, the edges are lifted as if they are fraying. It gives the sense that the stories that it holds can't be contained as it is bursting with life. 

The glass, an actual possession of my great grandmother, has been covered in pages from the same
book as the one seen in the video to provide a stronger visual link between the suitcase and the video.

The spoons and plate are from my great grandmother's dowry, the pattern on which was said to be hand carved. I decided to put in the 'tasbih' (string of brown beads, the Islamic equivalent of rosary beads one might say) as religion was always a very important part of her life. 

These are some of the photographs I managed to collect from my relatives. My great grandparents can be seen in the first one, with my great grandmother in the middle in the second photograph. Adding the photos to the suitcase just makes the story more real and believable.

When presenting this piece, I played the video separately, with the suitcase placed on a table against the wall onto which the video was projected. I think the presentation could be more effective if the video was projected onto the opened suitcase, so that the story is in essence captured within the objects, physically and metaphorically. 

In Steven Connor's 'Parapharnalia', he says 'such things inhabit space, but are a kind of temporizing with it, a refracting of the white noon of now into a chronic rainbow of times, with their twilight tints and hues. Such things hum with hint and import because they are there without being fully present; to hand, but not exactly here-and-now.' This is the feeling I get when surrounded by these objects. They are haunting in a sense, but beautifully so. But it is I who feels like a ghost; as time passes, it is these objects that are still alive, long after the people to whom they belonged are not- they are unstopped clocks. 

Magical Objects

In 'The Great Gatsby', Fitzgerald describes the objects that Gatsby associates some meaning with as 'enchanted objects', such as the green light with which he associates Daisy and the hope of being reunited with her. Once Gatsby is with her, the green light no longer holds the same significance; ''it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.'' These are the kinds of objects that I decided to look for; those that held meaning, had stories and thus became 'enchanted' because of our emotional investment in them..

Upon interviewing my neighbour, I found just what I was looking for. He had kept a collection of family relics and heirlooms; war medals, brocohes, wedding certificates, birth certificates etc, all kept locked and safe in an old, leather box.

The old, worn out leather adds to its feel of antiquity,
 proof of it's rich and eventful history..

I really like the frayed jute string that
holds the key and connects it to the box.  

 Each individual object found in the box had it's own life, a sense of being present but carrying with them an ancient weight, belonging an altogether different time..

     

Steven Connor, in his book 'Parapharnalia', describes objects like those above as 'magical objects'. He says 'We can do whatever we like to things, but magical things are things that we allow and expect to do things back to us. Magical things surpass themselves, in allowing us to increment and surpass ourselves with them.' Such is the nature of the objects I am interested in and wish to explore. However, for my project, I want to find objects that are 'magical' and 'enchanted' for me; something personal and meaningful. And I need not look very far...

The Lost Suitcases of Willard Asylum

The Willard Asylum of New York was an asylum for the chronically insane. Many of Willard's patients, once having entered it's wall, left only to be placed in it's graveyard filled with masses of, not named, but numbered graves. From within the old, abandoned building were discovered hundreds of suitcases of it's previous patients. Walter Benjamin describes possession as 'the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects' and that ultimately, 'it is he who lives in them'. The lost suitcases of Willard invoke this very sensation: the owners seem to be very much alive in their possessions.      

This now battered and deteriorating suitcase once belonged to a Delmar H. It was originally from a hotel in Bolgna,Italy.

   
Each suitcase contained fascinating objects, from everyday necessities to trinkets and ornaments and the owners most prized possessions. One patient, identified only as 'Anna', contained a list of all her glamorous objects...

It is most interesting to see the objects that they chose to bring with them, considering that they knew that the chances of them returning to their normal lives were slim. It makes one wonder what these possessions meant to their owners, what stories lie behind their decision to take them to their death bed, what deep connection they had to these inanimate objects and how they defined their personalities or even their illnesses..

Eleanor's sewing supplies.

This suitcase belonged to 'Dymtre'. It was said to have had 'notebooks filled with drawings of sine waves and mathematical things like that. There’s a wedding picture of Dmytre and his wife, and she’s holding a bouquet of fake flowers, which were also in the case.'Dmytre was said to have had gotten arrested by the Secret Service because he went to Washington, D.C. for saying that he was Margaret Truman’s husband.

   

Details of objects found in Dymtre's suitcase, including a red cross pin and a postcard.

Looking at these photographs, I am not filled with a sense of morbidity but rather an odd kind of nostalgia for a life I never lived. These objects are brimming with tales of their owners lives, each object unique. There is a strange comfort in looking at them, not simply because of their rarity or historical significance, but because they were part of someone's routine and by extension, them, therefore coming to life before us, revealing the lives of these long forgotten patients in profound and unexpected ways.

As Mrs Ramsay says in Virginia Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse': 'It was odd, she thought, how when one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they become one; felt they knew one, felt they were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus...as for oneself.'

Transforming the Everyday

To find inspiration for my new project, titled 'Transforming the Everyday', I decided to take a walk down Camden high street, home of the weird and wonderful. During my walk, I stumbled upon a lovely little antiques shop, with an over sized, white wooden rocking chair on its roof. It was in this shop that my passion for all things old and lost was revived. I was immediately drawn to the power of these objects, seemingly ordinary and mundane, but with an undeniable faint glow of a time gone by, of secrets of the life of it's previous possessors. These were not mere plates and trunks and mirrors and tables, these were living creatures, telling stories of their adventures, of what the places they had been and the people they had been loved by, if one only cared to listen.

Mirrors- Final Piece.

The poet Paul Eluard wrote: 'these squares are outwardly similar to existing squares and yet we have never seen them...we are an immense, previously inconceivable world.' The 'squares' that Eluard writes about seem quite similar to humans, in my opinion. Although we all look the same; two eyes, a nose and a mouth form the face of every human. And yet no two of us are the same. We are a complex combination of all that we have seen and heard and done, our deepest desires, our best and worst memories; we contain multitudes. Our physical states could never mirror our true selves. This is the idea that I wanted to explore in this piece.

I was inspired by 'Head of a Hostage' by Jean Fautrier, a sculpture that depicts a tortured victim of the second world war. The physically disfigured head mirrors the hardship and injustice suffered by the unidentified masses. Through this stop animation video, I wanted to evoke a similar feeling to the one Fautrier's piece does. By witnessing the life changing moments of the persona, one is able to form a better picture of him, his true self, making this video a mirror that reflects his life and struggles.

This was my first attempt at making a stop motion animation (one that involved figures, which proved more complex and challenging than the one consisting only of a cookie) so the animation is not as smooth and polished as it could be nor is the background as detailed and well made but I am pleased with the over all product as I think it successfully evokes the feelings and questions that I intended for it to.