Posts (page 2)

there are a lot of people using the bathroom around here.

this morning i woke up and felt a little sad. my bed was half-filled with half-finished projects, and surrounded by boxes, bags, backpacks, baskets, and jugs of windshield washer fluid -- all out of their rightful place, or halfway between their destination. i felt so slow. so entirely slow. i've been here 2 months! and i know i've accomplished things, i'm getting there, i'm moving, i'm thinking and processing and doing and making, but meanwhile i just feel slow.

i turned to the basket most recently displaced from my car, the basket filled with items, sentimental things, notes, and art parts that i have intended to install in my car, a moving car installation

tiara, crocodile/alligator, jar of sand from florida, jar of dirt from massachusetts, notes, chroche

(really, most of these things should just have been tossed, but really are entirely too much for me to throw away, but where else in my life is stable like the car in that it is a place i can install sentimental useless things? where else is there a space that i can see as my own in which to display the things that connect me to now non-existant things -- but more importantly people?). I don't really know why i haven't done this installation already, except that it just goes into the pile of things i am being slow about.

but regardless, i picked up the alligator (or crocodile? i feel embarrassed as a floridian to not know this in my heart and by sight and on flashcards), and squeezed it, hoping for some reassurance. in my house at school this past year, this crocodile/alligator hung outside my room, with a small sign underneath (decorated in gold sparkles of course) saying, "PLEASE SQUEEZE FOR ASSISTANCE". and visitors or my housemates would squeeze it, and then i would assist them! and it always was really pleasant and enjoyable and friendly. and i was hoping to hear that this morning. but then i didn't. all i could hear was a soft blowing noise. the squeek was gone! i don't know if that's from sitting in the really ridiculous heat-greenhouse-box that is my car for the past 3 months, but all i know is it's gone. the sound is gone.

i'm not going to say i cried (i did), or that i'm being a bit dramatic (i am), but i think that this does signal the end of an era. the summer is almost over. i am already hearing the inklings of people (that are not me) going back to school and knowing what they're doing and how they fit into the world and where they are. my school email has shifted over such that i can't log in until i mark "alumni login". people here are shifting and leaving soon. my role here is becoming more solid, but also confusing. i feel great and excited and in love with this place, but i'm also scared and unsure.

home-made bathing suit and elsewhere family vacation updates coming soon. just had to get a reflective moment in before the death of a squeeky friend goes on un-documented. 

Curating Your Desk as an Art Piece and Functional Interactive Workspace and Ideatank: a critical examination of transforming the front window space in 608 from the "Travel Agency" to the new "Tourism Beureau", a highly informative and organized location of entry and understanding.

I was inspired by the much-loved-past-residents, Billy and Jessie's website (oh man! It's so beautiful! must hurry to make my own website!), blog (which made me start my intense campaign to have elsewhere officially switch to tumblr because I am drooling over it), and specifically here their community project at Elsewhere, creating the Castle around a group of Resident Desks in the back of 608:

 So, based on these beautiful fabric walls, I have been dreaming of worlds of fabric (I know I know... but a slightly DIFFERENT world of fabric than Elsewhere...). Fabric flower boxes, fabric shingles, fabric wood-stoves, fabric walls, fabric curtains, fabric tables, fabric dinner, fabric beds, fabric clouds, fabric mountains...

And suddenly I realized exactly what I needed to make my desk area more than just a corner!! I needed to think about it like a whole SPACE, and how better to contain a space than to create your own all encompassing walls!?! I was struggling with the idea that my desk should be a public area, open to people in the community so that I can be a liason and outreach person easily, it should be in the front window, even though that feels very vulnerable and open (not to mention green-house hot), it should be a place where people can come and chat, get info, become part of the community. I really liked all those ideas but I still didn't want to be in my zone! It was just a bunch of stuff in a corner! And so now, I present an all-encompassing situation which solves many problems:

Welcome to the Tourism Bureau (the princess castle)!

Process

Product:

IMG_2331

Aliya magic

thoughts?

Dear Valued Reader;

You are Formally Invited to join me in my alter-ego self as the CITY reporter and Tourism Board Agent and Officer and Coordinator and Choreographer, Rose Maribelle. Take a jaunt over here to read all about CITY and what's going on in the downtown lives of our favorite Elsewherians and CITYzens.

Sincerely,
Aliya

hello! welcome back! hi! i'm back! i'm here! you're there, or wherever, but really, you should know that you are definitely welcome to come visit me here. for realz. let me tell you a little bit about here:

I've returned to Elsewhere. Since the last time we talked (unless you followed me to my super profesh senior thesis blog), I explored community-art outside of a collective, was part of another arts organization, put on different kinds of public-art-events, installed a multi-room fabric-based installation which included a team of improv performers and silly hats and memories and stories and letters, and I graduated college.

This season I'm back at Elsewhere as the Community Coordinator. I'm ready to bring it. Bring the ideas and experiences I've learned from this year, bring my critical thinking about my last summer here, and bring Greensboro and Elsewhere together in some amazing way!

Step one: get a super great email address. community@elsewhereelsewhere.org. wow, it's perfect! DONE.

What else has been going on?

-I moved into the Tourism Office, in the Travel Agency. It's in the front window of 608. It took me a little bit to settle in there. A solid day of moving things around, trying to figure out the un-even floor, and bookshelves, desks, lamps, fans. these are basics, but at elsewhere, you have to go searching for those things, and on top of it, you have to figure out a logical place for all the stuff you just moved out of wherever you're cleaning. it's tiring. but, you have to keep remembering that you have an entire building filled with things that you get to use for your intensely personal and useful and functional desk space! wow! For now, my desk is kinda just a desk. that's my job for tomorrow or thursday: make desk-magic (what this means is TBA)

-I kicked butt in the kitchen. This season I'm the Kitchen Kommando, which i was kinda iffy about at first, but then Danna posed it like this, "think of this job as a long term, uber-functional living installation. Think about curating the kitchen as an art piece. Think about making it a piece you would put into your artistic portfolio." WOAH: what a challenge. I took it. Last night I installed some new community communication boards: chalkboards to discuss important things like alternative words to the incredibly over-used elsewhere word of the month, "moment" (used as a verb, noun, preposition, really whatever you want: "this is a real tofu moment right here." "and then after the artist conversation we'll have a dance-party moment" ETC ETC ETC.... AAAHHHH! in truth, it's kinda addictive. but i gotta keep this word under control). We also now have a "centerpiece competition sign-up for the next month, and a place to discuss our upcoming Elsewhere Family Vacation to the Beach in early August! I made a folder and wrote "ACCOUNTABILITY" on it, and hung it right next to the kitchen table. Everyone started asking me questions about that almost immediately... in truth it's just a pad of paper and a pen, and people will be able to write down and communicate to everyone else about their dish or their mess. I'm not sure if this'll really work in truth, but we'll see what happens.

-I started a personal room installation. It felt good to finally settle in somewhere after living out of my car (fun, but) for a month. I put up a tiny shelf to display a random assortment of things, including: a book called "Peanut and Jilly Forever (Peanut Butter and Jelly, No. 2): Peanut and Jilly, the most competitive girls in their class, think that they cannot stand each other, until their teacher assigns them the task of studying and writing reports about each other....", a tiny sailboat, a ceramic sculpture that my friend Kristian sent me that looks like one of the stuffed animals I designed this spring, and a few stems of a dried flowers picked from Hampshire College the night I left. I also found the lace collar that Lily wore all the time last summer; now it's on my window sill. Future plans: intense landscape-skyscape surrounding my bed. So I'll take adventures to unknown places in my dreams! It's just thoughts right now, but I've really been feeling the abstract-landscapes lately, and the idea of floating clouds makes me really excited. Not to mention the fact that I have a super awesome roommate, Amber, and we're planning a collabo installation... more thoughts needed before reporting on that one.

-Business Class, led by myself and Amber, is in full swing. by the end of the summer (middle? now? yesterday?) we plan to have our business-artist selves fully equipt with the skills, tools, and ephemera needed to be official businesswomen in the world of making art. On the to-do list: make our websites (actually make content this time? not spend so much time dreaming of the aesthetics or complicated html we can't actually make?), make business cards, make etsy stores <<< CHECK IT OUT!! http://aliyarose.etsy.com >>>  (to sell our handmade, in-demand goods!), and update our artistic long term resumes. look out world, highly marketable artists coming your way.

-I jumped into the SEA! A big project I'll be working on this summer is developing the SEA, the South Elm Alliance. Elsewhere is reaching out! We're connecting and preserving our south elm community! AND, we got a great grant to work on this with! So, while i'm super excited by this, it's also incredibly overwhelming. I have to walk around? and talk to people? and enroll them in how awesome Elsewhere is?? Geezeeee. I keep reminding myself that this is what I want to be doing and making, and this is the best way to connect with people and form communities, and that it'll happen! It's slow work and takes time and face contact and multiple meetings! But it's also just scary. My first excursion last week went well though. I felt encouraged by how I could just go up to someone and tell them about this place and give them a flyer and genuinely connect in a small way. It's a start. I'm starting, beginning, settling in, making my place here. It sorta feels like the beginning of my senior thesis project all over again-- I just had forgotten how sucky it was at the beginning when I didn't know what the heck I was doing and just felt flounder-y.

Our first project was being in the Greensboro Fourth of July Parade!

SEA poster composite

• we made some incredible costumes: two "fish-ponchoes" which people wore over hats and made them look like fish, one whale poncho (with a gold tooth!), a yellow submarine we could push around on wheels, and three individual cardboard boats that people wore like suspenders.
  
• two of our neighbors marched in the parade with us! Thank you Charlie and Ruth!
• two awesome volunteers showed up (more on time than we were!), put on some costumes and enthusiastically paraded with us as well! Thanks Morgan and Graham!
• On top of a parade, we also hosted a children's storytelling and activities tent at the festival part of Greensboro's celebration. Thank you to interns Alexa and Diana for organizing that piece of our participation in Greensboro's 4th of July!
• In the evening, resident artist Anthony and I made a delish 4th of July dinner for our Elsewhere community: vegan potato salad (tahini, mustard, lemon, oil and parsely!), vegan asian citrus cole-slaw, stir-fried greens, hot dogs, hamburgers (mixed by our very own grampa george), black-bean burgers, and for dessert! a peach-blueberry cobbler (also vegan!) wow! wash that down with a cheerwine! It was so good. I love dinner parties.
• *****PHOTOS!!!: check out ELSEWHERE'S FLICKR STREAM!!******
  

back to the installation of sleeping, cleaning, living, brushing my teeth, making magical things happen.
aliya

P.S. I am gonna try for shorter and more concise (more frequent?) posts this summer: Rockin' the less is more mantra. Well, we'll see I guess. That might turn into an entirely too vague and meta dialogue with myself.

P.P.S. I'll be the official update-er for Elsewhere's CITY blog: check it out! I don't even know what that version of my internet self is gonna look like...

***

SIDE NOTE:

we just had an artist talk (internal informal presentations that the visiting artists give a few days after they arrive to introduce us to their work) by anthony lowe, who did a collection/blog which picked out incredibly embarrassing or raw bits from strangers' blogs and re-posted them on his blog. This makes me both incredibly self-conscious of my own random ramblings on this blog, but it also inspired me to create yet another blog. This will be an invented blog, an invented set of ponderings and reports. I'm thinking it could be a collabo blog... we'll see. any suggestions, leave a comment.

tonight, after the neighborhood dinner we've been planning for and having meetings about all week which served 40 people delicious soup in elsewhere's imaginary family restaurant, fancy bistro, and elementary school cafeteria; after the unexpected sing-a-long which sprung up in the kitchen by non-elsewherians and which puzzled and confused us all because it was so normally weird; after the game of CITY and a possum-busting theme song played with the only three chords i know; after the dance party; we went on a parade walk.

blanket, dan, ernesto, and lineberry and i made a parade down elm street. blanket played his cassette-player-boom-box hooked up to a tetris gameboy which was our soundtrack, and the rest of us pulled small wooden elsewhere dogs on strings, each of which squeaked a little when they rolled. we wore our CITY costumes, and paraded through the crowds of people out on the town for friday night, waiting in line for the clubs downtown. i felt especially beautiful in a yellow elsewhere dress which draped just right and had long pleats to the floor which made for especially regal parade walking.

it didn't matter that the dress didn't really fit or that i had just met these people four days ago, or that my desk isn't set up or my bed isn't quite right, or that i'm missing so many of my closest elsewhere family members, or that the parade itself was entirely stupid. i'm home. 

I am back at school (missing elsewhere of course) and moving onto my senior project! I've started a new blog to document my process through this intimidating undertaking...<<  http://aliyain3d.blogspot.com  >>... Bookmark it and check in often! I would love input, comments, criticism, and responses from the elsewhere community and beyond...

see you on the next blog-o-sphere,
aliya

1. The constant flow of people
2. Late night, spontaneous overhauls and re-dos and re-organizations of the most complicated and overwhelming spaces
3. Lily making that dance-y face.
4. Stephanie's crazy smile face
5. North Carolinian accents
6. Clapping for everything.
7. Saying, "Wow. What a great _____." and meaning it!
8. Having long serious discussions about capitalization.
9. Community dinners with 15 people nightly.
10. That one night that it was just me and Lily and four residents at dinner and it was like a tiny family.
11. Group complaining about the bathroom being disgusting.
12. George's dancing hands
13. Danna laughing uncontrollably.
14. The SmackDown with The Slaughterhouse and the Dannaconda. Tellin' it like it is.
    
15. When Mary's face and eyebrows go up and she asks if you have anything else you'd like to share or talk about.
16. J's giggling
    
17. General Gamble Giggling
    
18. going to the pond in the country.
19. Super Piano Bouncy Ball, and finding bouncy balls EVERYWHERE.
20. my lily bean
21. everyone hanging out in the log cabin with the lights in there and talking about middle school.
22. Everyone swooning over how cute and great Grant is.
23. Everyone swooning over how cute and great Chef Graham is.
24. Having Chef Graham come visit us each night after his restaurant closed. Why does he even like us so much?
25. Playing CITY.
26. Eating so much JIF and feeling like it's an ok thing to do.
27. Monday mornings
28. My amazing studio-mates
29. Absorbing new people into our community
30. Going to Coe's and buying Cheerwine.
31. Not showering for three days in a row and feeling totally fine about it.
    
32. Trying to figure out how Mary functions with her very picky eating habits.
33. Receiving mail art from my family!
34. Playing dress-up everyday.
35. Pretending to be a legitimate costume designer.
36. That everyone walks around with a billion projects ideas just like me.
    
37. Dance parties where everyone dances their hearts out.
38. So many small soft crawl-y spaces
39. Swimming and working out at the friendly clean YMCA.
40. The big waterslide!
41. So many ribbons
42. My tree branches and ribbon nests over my bed.
43. Laminating things.
44. How excited everyone gets to have pretzles and eggo waffles and pickles.
    
45. The endless massive race to eat food before it rots
46. Every artist conversation event. And all the future ones that I won't get to see come to fruition first hand.
    
47. Being in such a creative exciting community-based environment.
48. Having my daily "work" be sewing ruffles and seaweed and installing art pieces in a small nook in elsewhere.
49. Calling up places and asking them to give us things for free because we are a non-profit.
50. Working 11 hour days, 6 days a week for free.
51. Meeting and working with the coolest artists ever.
    

I guess this is a for-now-goodbye elsewhere. I will miss you terribly. I hope hope hope there is a future for us together next summer, because you are a beautiful place with a beautiful vision. It's so nice to know there is a place with open arms and delicious food that's there at the end of this final-year-of-school thing coming up, and to know that it's filled with beautiful people, even if none of them are getting paid.

Until then! Thank you Stephanie, George, J, Mary, Danna, Ian, Saralee, Lily, Eliza, Yuri, Colleen, Chelsea, Katie, Chris, Alex, Ellis, Shalin, Jona, Kaylan, Claire, Suse, Jason, Abby, Amy, Leanne, Les, Travis, Meng, Joshua, Chad, Brian, Grant, Chef Graham, and all the other people I heard stories about.

Thank you very loyal blog readers. I hope you will continue on to my obviously more boring real-life blog when I make it. I feel like it's time for a new blog as I am obviously a new changed woman.

LOVE,
ALIYA

• 39: number of days spent elsewhere
  
• 26: number of times I lost and refound my shoes
• 38: number of hours spent at the YMCA (or walking to and from).
• 3: number of times I was mistaken for or asked a question as if I were an official Obama Organizer
• 3: number of times I cried
• 2: number of times I did laundry.
  
• 19: number of times I tried to wake up about 1.5 hours earlier than I actually woke up
• 8: number of people I stopped hating and started loving
• 2: number of community wall calendars I recreated
• 6: number of dinners I prepared for the community
• 19: number of egg sandwiches cooked for me and others
• 2: number of times I visited Wal-Mart
• 7: number of locopops consumed
• over 34: number of locopops purchased for myself and others (unsure how many I was actually reimbursed for...)
• 2: number of trips to the mall with Stephanie and Mary
  
• 10: number of late night or early morning sits on the fire escape / outdoor upstairs office
• 2: number of early morning bargain sales I woke up for.
• 2: number of CITY's played.
• 5: number of dance parties enjoyed
  
• 9: number of saffron dresses collected / made / altered / dyed / purchased
  
• 12: number of residents who I met during my time elsewhere.