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Fedre’s Y4
Learning Journal

 1. Main page
2. Process overview
3. Walks
4. 35mm film photographies
5. Runway experiments
6. Midjourney experiments                        (I)
7. 35mm film experiments
8. W I P
9. Midjourney experiments                       (II)
10. Lightbox process
11. Processing 
12. Final outcome

Studio pro-ject overvi-ew





Initial studio proposal ++ evolution of the project

an overview



Here I explain my thought processes. I show my referencess, link my processes and attempt to give an understanding of my journey.





Initial Studio Proposal:


My initial idea is to explore the need for comfort. To discover one’s needs and identity there is a must and an aim for it. I want to explore specifically how queer and neurodivergent people have the necessity to create nurturing spaces in their life in order to function better and achieve this comfort within themselves or a community.  Drawing from public spaces and experiences (such as queer club culture) to private ones (our rooms or home). I would like to link this to the control or lack of control of stimuli such as light or sound.


The works of Claudia del Barrio – a digital artist who focuses on ‘‘the construction of identity through the intersection of popular culture with the narratives of fiction that emerge from new visual media’’. I often think about one specific work of hers called ‘‘GASLIGHT GATEKEEP GIRLBOSS (2021)’’ that fits the description of her work perfectly. What most impacts me about it is how well she conveys so many messages in a 10-second video. For me, it makes you think about how you depict yourself on social media vs how you do it in other domains of your life, where does social media place us on the spectrum between fiction and reality, and overall makes you reflect on how you build your identity in a world where social media is a part of it. They are also funny and exaggerated but simple in looks. – website, instagram.


There was a project I saw this year in Sónar called ‘‘ENAKD: Decoding Human Emotions’’ that also impacted me. I like the idea of mixing science and design, and that’s basically what they are doing. They use EEG technology to measure emotional parameters and they use this data to an AI to interpret and create images based on them to reflect the individual’s emotional estate. – website, youtube video.


I also thought about Ryoji Ikeda’s performances and exhibitions. I like the impact that fast visuals/light and sound has on the viewer. I’ve never been to one of his exhibitions, but I saw his performance in Sónar 2023 and I couldn’t describe my emotions after that. It left me in a state of shock that I wouldn’t know how to even start describing. – website, youtube video.


Bimboficadas is a podcast made by Maria Barrier and Samantha Hudson where they discuss modern socio-political matters in their livingroom. Samantha is an icon of queer Spanish culture. Both are queer and neurodivergent, and they talk about their life experiences and points of view while showing the reality in which people from those collectives live in. The podcast is in a humorous tone, but raw at the same time. These podcasts are in Spanish, and they are not translated anywhere. – spotify.


The key theory of my proposed work is queer culture. I would like to approach it in a personal way, so drawing from personal experience as a queer neurodivergent spanish (actually, catalan) person. I would like to explore pop culture, and club culture alongside. Maybe drawing from a psychological approach, as I’m interested in mixing art and science in some way. I would like to divulgate, normalize a reality by talking about it.

So far, I’m still unsure what approach I want to take. To start gaining a sense of direction I would like to research queer and intersectional feminist artists that also explore identity – specially linked to spanish culture. I want to research all the possible spheres or contexts of the concept of “comfort” and define what is the exact meaning I will be taking onto this project. I would also like to start defining other limits such as what personal and private spheres I would be drawing from.


I would like to use AI in some way, for light or visuals, maybe for sound. I’m not sure about the direction yet. I started being quite interested in stained glass, so I might want to use it to inform my practical research in some way as well. I would also like to use 3d printing in some way as well.


Not sure if I would like to create something that can be experienced at home, or something that is more exhibition based. Maybe both. I want the purpose to be speculative. Maybe functional in some way as well.



First steps:


As I discussed with my tutors, this is quite a personal topic. Any choice of topic can end up being personal, as everyone processes, understands and create things in a concrete way. But this topic, in particular, has another level (or degree) that makes it personal. My initial thought was to explore this seek of identity through comfort, which I think is very linked - especially to people who are neurodivergent and queer. I liked the idea of especially exploring this dichotomy of how things that might be uncomfortable or seem uncomfortable are actually safe spaces for trans people to explore their identity. I was planning on exploring the need for raving as Mckenzie Wark calls it, but as the course started my health took a toll. I suddenly started having a lot of difficultly-manageable symptoms that overwhelmed me and exhausted me to the point of not being able to connect with my project -or my life- anymore. Suddenly I was in the most uncomfortable mental space and I could not find comfort anywhere. As things progressed I managed to get a diagnosis of iron deficiency and low B-12. This has been the hardest thing to process in a long time. I tried to reflect on my idea of comfort during those months, there has been slow progress in my symptoms and I can confidently say that I gained a lot of knowledge on this topic from a completely different point of view. 

I have been unintentionally exploring how to find comfort when your mind and your body are not a comfortable space. Although I experienced depression and anxiety in the past, I never felt like such a stranger to myself, I no longer understood how to navigate my mind. Something my tutor suggested for this project was: "Try to analyze your own experience from an outsider's perspective". And by doing this, I realised that everything that has been happening, and how I tried to find this comfort in the past few months is a key part of my research. 


Trying to keep myself sane:

To understand the journey, I need to get into my personal experience of what happened and how I lived it. I was vegan for 8 years, became vegetarian after, and have been since.  I always struggled with keeping my iron levels up, so I got used to feeling tired and low-energy and learned how to thrive in that state. This time, things were different. This time I felt like something was not right. Not knowing was scary, and when I got the diagnosis I did not believe that was it. How can a deficiency affect me so much? There was definitely something else wrong that I wanted to resolve straight away. It was surprising to witness how your mental health can become so physical. Anxiety and depression no longer felt familiar. I would have incredible insomnia where I couldn't sleep at all throughout the night. I would feel a strong derealisation, dissociation, feeling waves of unbalance and dizziness, endless loopholes, etc. Basically, I was feeling a stranger in my own mind and body. I wanted to know WHAT was happening and WHY it was happening so I could know HOW to solve it.


During those months I felt stuck but tried to reflect on comfort and move forward with my project. I felt I was falling behind, but I can see now that I never stopped exploring this idea and producing things that can be used as research.

Grounding myself in order to autoregulate and function:

There are a few things that are constant in my life. I like taking pictures, I have done so for years. Sometimes with my phone, sometimes with my camera. I started using photography as a way to be present whenever I was going to the mountain with my family when I was a kid. It awoke the need for collecting. Collecting small things I encountered in my path was another way of being present. But photography is different because you're not only collecting an object and an abstract memory attached to it, you're collecting the light reflected through an object, the light of a place, the shadows, the resulting colors, freezing the shapes from a certain angle, and saving just a squared fragment of what your eyes are seeing at that moment. There is intention on how you frame the picture, and there is a connection with your future self. On how you want to explain a story to yourself, on how you want to remember your memories. In a way you’re curating your own memories, the ones you want to remember, how you want to remember them, and potentially modifying certain bits when shaping them. 

The past few years I started to rediscover analogue photography, especially when I came to realise I was living the life my teenager self thought would never live. I was sharing my days with my favourite people. I was sharing a flat with my best friend. I started a romantic relationship with another of my best friends. I finally managed to find a job I loved. I was studying a degree I was really enjoying. I wanted to collect those memories, look back at them and be able to always feel the joy I was feeling at that moment. And in a very organic way I came to find myself in the analogue film rythm. I didn’t own a camera back then, so the cycle was: 

  •    To buy a disposable camera
  •    Take pictures
  •    Bring the camera to be developed
  •    Wait for the email saying that the pictures were ready
  •    Look at them
  •    Go and collect them

Something I realised this time when taking pictures was that they not only helped me ground and avoid thinking about all the symptoms and emotional processes I was going through, it connected me with the process of being patient while tracking the progress of days. 

It was a way of communicating with the future me. I knew those pictures would be seen by me in a few weeks or months, helping me connect with the need to carry on. Continue. Progress. How will I feel by the time I see them? There is a natural nostalgic response to seeing past moments in pictures, and I also thought I was taking them by taking into account this possible future nostalgia. So many of the pictures were trying to capture moments of momentary comfort that came from taking care of me during a journey that felt endlessly scary. I wanted moments to be important. I wanted to retain them. Maybe for future reference, to remind me that everything is volatile. I wanted to tell myself that I was not only in waiting mode until I felt better, I wanted my future self to see those moments through nostalgic lenses and feel they were holding a value that maybe I wasn't easily finding at that moment. In a way, I wanted to control the meaning that those moments would hold in the future. 

I also realised I started moving away from subject pictures, I started finding comfort in places that weren’t necessarily people. In a way, I think I started focusing more on trying to find beauty in the way I see things or I perceive certain scenarios, rather than the energy I find in people, or how beautiful I think they are. I started finding more comfort in my own perception of my surroundings and maybe wanting to narrate my own story - as a narrator of my experience rather than focusing only on being an observer of the experiences of those around me. I don’t want to substract value on the pictures I take from people, though. They still hold a lot of value, and they still tell a story about myself.



Throughout this process, I saw my mom for a few days. She is someone whom I can create comfortable moments with. She is an expert at just being. I did enjoy her company, and she made me reflect a lot on my processes; by doing and by talking. We watched "Perfect Days" together and I found interesting the relationship between photography (or the camera) and the main character that is depicted on the film. It made me connect and reflect on my relationship with photography (and my camera). The film is described as "A profound tale of finding peace, meaning, and beauty in life".  I had bittersweet feelings about how the fact that he is more used to being by himself than around people is romanticized, especially for all the connotations that masculinity holds around feelings and the devotion to work in Japanese society...



But I found this idea that shows in the film about taking pictures of the same subject over and over again interesting. I can relate to that. I do the same. I like taking pictures of Palmito all the time, anywhere we are. I like taking pictures of my friends whenever I am with them too. Or the path I've been walking whenever I feel anxious and depressed for the past few years. The track of time. Something tangible that makes you connect with the passing of time. It feels like I want to collect pictures of that people in those moments as if I was building a sticker album of people’s most true moments with me.

During those days, my mom also recommended and gifted me a book called "Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through The Storm".

That has been helping me understand how to connect with my fear (which manifests as anxiety). I will share some key things that made me reflect, connect with myself, and find comfort. I especifically thought a lot about that book on my second walk






After coming back from Barcelona, I decided to go on my third walk and that made me think about information. How we get information through movement, how we fill in gaps of information to cretae 3D shapes in our brain of our environment. 

I started seeing a connection between rythms and cycles and information. In order to implement new information, new knowledge, new learnings our brains have to repeat new patterns a few times before implementing them. But also, through the walking, we get new points of view of objects that give us more information on the different qualities of the object. I saw a connection with memories here. When we remember, we rebuild information. We sometimes revisit memories so much, that we create new information on them without realising it and maybe we end up remembering things that actually never happened. Sometimes we don’t remember what happened, but we remember how we felt very vividly. We sometimes have inaccurate information, we sometimes miss some bits, we sometimes just invent or mix up dreams and expectations with reality, and that is what our memories are build from.

I started to think a lot about curation as well, some things that make me connect with my past are songs and I like curating spotify playlists. This idea of being a curator of my own memories is something that reminds me of an artist//curator that I find quite interesting. His name is Alberto Guerrini, and his artist’s name (or the name of his project) is “Gabber Eleganza” and I found out about him many years ago through Tumblr, when he was only an archivist/curator of old hardcore and gabber. In his website, he describes the project as:
Gabber Eleganza initially started as a blog which quickly flourished into a multifold research forms. The aim of the project it to building up a bridge between the sonic landscape and aesthetic side of Hardcore and post-rave cultures and the contemporary culture of music and art through printed publications, music, installations and live performances.He also has a label called “Never Sleep” where he publishes music, movies, and merchandise related to hardcore. I went to his performance (The Hakke show) from Sónar festival in Barcelona last year and there were a few phrase that stayed with me: “A distant memory that keeps pulling me forward” and “Sabotage memories”.
 

This is a song that is called “Can’t remember” and one of the few lyrics it has is “I can’t remember my memories”. I find fascinating the way he inquires about memories, the past, and nostalgia from the early years of hardcore and gabber (worth mentioning this song came out on 2020). I find the above mentioned statements to contain a lot of meaning with only a few words. 

I own a zine from him as well (shared below), where he collected rave ephemera from the 90s. The use of ephemera for those specific objects is also quite interesting to me. Some things are enjoyed for a short period of time, but the memories that they bring are enjoyed forever. Memories are a very big and powerful part of who we are. The way we archive them, the way we curate them, the time we take to preserve them... they define us. Or at least I connect with these ideas and they resonate to me. I feel quite connected to my nostalgia, nostalgia and melancholy mean the same thing to me sometimes but other times, nostalgia is a “distant memory that keeps pulling me forward” as he says. 
When writting my DHT I also read - and only just discovered -  McKenzie Wark and her book on Raving. She makes such a good use of words to explain the raving experience as a trans person. It is one of the books where I felt most represented. This book also made me think a lot about how important it is to actually connect with our experiences and to try to put them into words, or visualise them somehow. Experiences shape us, we are what we experience and it is important to find our own voice to explain those experiences to ourselves. To give support to ourselves by validating them and make them real. We existed, we experienced “this”, it made us feel “this”, it change “something” in our lives, in our self. I find this validating. Even the memories that hurt and make me cry remind me that I am alive, I lived those things, I am here now, I am a sensitive person, I am me. I sometimes felt like raving was not a good coping mechanism to regulate myself and felt ashamed that it was such a big part of my life. I find this a metaphor for other felt experiences I had throughout the years. McKenzie Wark brought me the courage to reclaim myself as an acceptable human being: being trans is nothing to be ashamed of, neither enjoying raving so much. I’m going to share below a few exerpts from her book that ressonated me and made me connect with myself and my intentions when raving:
“Drugs are a part of rave culture, but sober raving is also a thing. I take a break in the midmorning to go home and nap. Come back clean for the closing set. The room, a miasma of fog and sweat. Kip Davis, the lighting designer, bouncing colored strobes off the vaporous air itself, refractions zagging. A hand reaches out, and I see it’s attached to R, looming over the gloam in her six-inch pleasers. I’d intended to hang back but turns out I need it: to slip and shimmy myself to the front of the room, lose all awareness of brain and body, and trip hard just on the situation. It’s tempting to romanticize such moments. Mostly it’s just a grind, the body granulated into sound, light; selves loosening into others. It might take hours. The ravers I choose to be around, those who need it and can maintain, are patient. It isn’t grace, but not unlike grace, it comes when it chooses, not when you want. I don’t know why I need this, but I need it. Others do too, maybe it hits the same way for them, maybe not. 

Trans people are not the only ones who dissociate—but we tend to be good at it. We’re a kind of people who need to not be in body or world. The body feels wrong. The world treats us as wrong. Dissociation can be debilitating. And also sometimes not. I used to write a lot, in dissociated states. Then I transitioned, and couldn’t write at all. And yet still needed to dissociate. I felt better about being embodied, but the world didn’t. So—raves. And out of raves, the writing came back, slowly. I want to recover at least some kinds of dissociation from the language of psychiatrists. I want to find ways this disability can also be enabling. A way to find out things about the world. So now I have two dissociated practices that I need to live: raving and writing. Raving got the writing going again. It’s a challenge to bring them together. It’s taking patience, and practice.” - Pages 7&8, chapter 1.

“Later, when I talk to dj Nick Bazzano about it, he has a different take. “You have to water your friends” he says. “The rave is like a mirror, a mirror ball, of the precarity of queer ex- istence. It’s about who knows how to improvise, who will trust in improvisation as an immanent form of social practice. So that’s who’s on the list: people who can’t afford tickets, people for whom it’s not a commodity experience, people who make it happen. You could call it reparative discrimination.” (...) Somewhere in that long conversation, I mentioned to Q how, before transition, dancing was one of the few times this body felt at home. Particularly if the music was techno. My theory being that it’s a music, or more like a sonic technology, made for aliens. Being made for aliens, it’s a sound in which no human body is more welcome than any other. Being no less at home in it than any other body, I feel like this body belongs, in techno, when I dance.” - Pages 12&13, chapter 2.

“To be free of a world that hates us, disrespects us, misun- derstands us: it’s almost impossible, even in New York City. A good rave, on a good night—that is where I can feel like my body is not an anomaly, or rather: not the only anomaly. It’s a distribution of anomalies without a norm, anomalous only to each other.7 That’s what a good rave makes possible. Although let’s never forget that we took this configuration of fugitive possibilities—from Black people.” - Page 14, chapter 2.
These reflections on the body - the raving body, the trans body - made me reflect and connect with my own experiences with my raving body and my trans body. She mentions dissociation, but I think for me the idea of entering a meditative state defines those experiences better. I started understanding the need for raving and the need for taking film pictures, the need for walking as a survival method. At this point I finished writting my DHT dissertation and decided to title it “Raving as a survival”(link to the dissertation). 


Not long after, I visited an exhibition called “TRANSCESTRY” in the “museum of transology” in London. I took a few pictures, which I´ll be sharing below that also made me reflect on my experience as a trans person and how important it is for me to find validation within myself and within a community (my community, the trans community, etc).


I like the idea of creating a succession of testogels labeled by number to show the ammount of tubes that one person has used throughout a certain period of time in their life. I thought my lightbox could try and follow this intention. And I liked the use of stricking colours to highlight the stuff on them. Sometimes overpowering colours are actually an aid for whatever is on top of them to be more visible, I would like to rethink my use of paint for the degree show and use one that would have a bolder energy.





Video Abstract: