CONNECTIONS

The artifact I brought is a pile of hair accumulated during this week on my brush and those of my roommates (LINK VIDEO: https://youtu.be/CPOQz_3Eyyo).

Hair was the first thing that came to mind during the discussion of the first lesson on the theme of experimentation and atmosphere. There's no reason - or at least there wasn't at that precise moment - I simply let myself be carried away by the atmosphere of the moment, without judgments and with the freedom to use anything for the creation of the artifact.

As the lesson progressed, the image easily connected to the theme of everyday life when the professor asked the following question: "Do you ever do something out of the ordinary/method/routine in your daily life?" Well, the answer is no, but instead of removing the hair from the brush and throwing it away, as I do every day, I decided to collect it to try to recreate what I had seen in my imagination: an indefinite, shapeless, and chameleon-like thing suspended in the air, with this effect of seeing/not seeing, "blurred," changing face with the slightest movement (of the observer, the wind, the light...).

Since I like to give meaning to things and make various connections, I wanted to understand why that particular image had appeared out of nowhere in my mind, which at that precise moment was able to create particular synaptic connections to reproduce it.

Reading the text, I was struck by the phrase "phenomena that blur the boundaries," which easily connected me to the initial image (and also the concept of limits is among my favorites). The text talks about this atmosphere, the endless, flexible, mutable, subjective, open, revisable process, ongoingness, open-endedness, incomplete, collective, non-uniform, unpredictable, uncontrollable, influenced, and in turn influential.

I would like to focus on all these characteristics and point out their bidirectional movement, their complementarity, that is, how the exact opposite is understood in meaning, and therefore how the human being, to choose consciously, for example, the path of experimentation, must live, experience, and also know the method, the norms, the objective.

Identifying with the actor, to physically modify the shape of the mass of hair hanging in the air, one needs a way to try to direct one's will, to have a certain "control": the spectators are invited to implement the mass, pull it, or change it. And here we move from the individual to the collective: individuals approach, circle around the artifact, even just by moving the air and changing the reflections of light on the hair, beginning to interact with it, changing the initial mass and unwittingly collaborating with each other.

In class, the topic also arose that at first glance the pile of hair provokes disgust, referring to the trash, but then it makes people reflect on the why, it makes them delve deeper (and in fact, the hidden meaning was then identified). ANd another thing is that hair decomposes very slowly, even when fallen.

This work aims to make people understand that they cannot perform actions only individually, but that they lead to a change, influencing the atmosphere and other people too, making them discover the connections that exist between everything and everyone, how everything eventually reconnects. So from the individual (represented by the hair, which through DNA, makes it possible to discover a person's identity) we move to the collectivity.

Thinking about a future development of the artifact, I can imagine an exhibition in two ways: a room with the pile of hair of many different people suspended in the center, precisely to represent the idea of the identity-collectivity binomial, the set of many people, somehow connected to each other, influencing each other, even just by breathing the same air; the second way of the exhibition would be a various 'objects' from everyday life but out of context (just like the mass of hair that usually ends up in the trash).