2 posts tagged “sea”

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!

I love parades and so I signed us up to have a float! and then invited all our neighbors to march with us. It was really great. Successes:

• 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!!******
  

So that's what's been going on around here! And, I've been lucky enough to have visitors already! Elizabeth, with me through the thick-and thin of everything, AND my dedicated driving-down-south partner, was my first visitor here on the first few days when I was pulled from one meeting to another, not really having the settled-ness to give her a proper tour, but we managed to make a three-layer carrot cake and have a proper send-off none-the-less. Matt, John, and Ashley were my second visitors, stopping in last weekend just long enough for a look around and some delish dinner (tofu fish sticks?) on their expansive trip of the south. Thank you for visiting all of you, your presence in this wonderland makes it a bit more real, while at the same time making me a little sad for the community I have just left. 

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.