London Project

O "London Project" foi o meu primeiro projecto na Saint Martins (já o fiz à várias semanas, mas só agora é que tive tempo para o postar). A ideia consistia em criar algo que estivesse directa ou indirectamente ligado ao rio Tamisa. Podíamos criar qualquer coisa em qualquer formato...por isso tínhamos um milhão de opções e escolhas a fazer antes de mais quanto à natureza do trabalho em si...e sendo o rio Tamisa uma das principais causas de Londres ser a fantástica cidade que é hoje, havia também imensas formas de o interpretar...

O primeiro dia começou por ser um "walk and draw day", onde parávamos a cada 5 a 10 minutos para desenhos de 1 minuto apenas...podiamo-nos focar no que quiséssemos...não tínhamos de modo algum de desenhar necessariamente isto ou aquilo...mais uma vez era completamente livre....depois já no Royal Festival Hall, um edifício que fica à beira rio parámos para almoçar e fazer um desenho de 1 hora...depois foi hora de ir até à Tate Modern e fazer mais alguns desenhos e apresentá-los ao grupo. Aqui estão apenas alguns dos desenhos que fiz (são todos desenhos de 1 minuto, excluindo o último em que tive aproximadamente 1 hora):

The "London Project" was the first project of my first year at Saint Martins (actually I´ve alrealy done it a few weeks ago, but I just got the time now to post it). The brief was to make a project related to the river Thames. We could do literaly anything as long as it would be directly or indirectly related to the river itself...this way we had a million options to make so we could decided in what to focus...since the river is one of the main reasons of why London has grown up to the city it is today, we had quite a lot ways of interpreting it...

The first day was the "walk and draw day", where we would stop each 5 or 10 minutes to make a 1 minute drawing...we could draw anything we wanted to...we didn´t have to necessarily draw anything obviously related to the river or something like that...we were completely free to draw anything that would caught our attention. When we got to the river we went to the Royal Festival Hall, a very nice building on the riverside, where we had lunch and had to make a draw for 1 hour. Then we went to Tate Modern where drew a little bit more and afterwards we had to present it to our peers and to the teacher.

These are just a few drawings I´ve made on that day (every drawing was made in just 1 minute, aside from the last one, where we had 1 hour):

(one minute drawings)

(one minute clouds :P)

(one hour drawing)

Num dos dias seguintes fomos experimentar técnicas de impressão...aprendemos a técnica de "água-forte" (etching) e monoprinting (não sei muito bem como é a tradução exacta em português). Foi muito interessante porque tinhamos o dia todo para experimentar-mos diferentes processos e estavamos à vontade para fazermos o que quiséssemos. Tivemos assim a oportunidade de desenvolver os nossos desenhos e ideias do rio. Aqui estão alguns dos resultados finais:

On one of the following days we went to Printmaking...we learned how to make etching and monoprinting. It was very interesting as we had all day to experiment different approaches, processes and we were completely free to do whatever we wanted. This way we had an extra opportunity to develop our ideas and drawings of the river. Here are some of the final results:

No último dia do London Project tivemos a apresentação final - foi muito engraçada a forma como a fizemos porque tinhamos umas 6 filas de mesas cheias de trabalhos, onde andavamos em grupos a comentar e a apresentar os trabalhos...e considero super interessante o facto de haver trabalhos tão distintos...só mostra que para um mesmo projecto existem milhares de ideias e interpretações!

O meu projecto consistia numa espécie de animação onde se via como Londres tinha mudado ao longo dos séculos especificamente à beira rio...achei muito interessante o papel que o rio desempenhou e desempenha sobre Londres por isso resolvi abordar esse aspecto...fui muito inspirada pela frase "The river Thames is liquid history".

Projectei imagens de elementos de Londres, numa foto da cidade à beira rio, as quais deveriam representar de alguma forma o ambiente vivido durante os séculos XIV / XV, no presente e como imagino que será no futuro. Idealmente esta seria uma instalação a ocorrer no local onde tirei a foto do tio, onde estes elementos seriam projectados em ecrãs transparentes colocados na margem do rio, recriando a paisagem do Tamisa - como se fossem uma espécie de layers colocadas entre o nosso olhar e o rio. No entanto, para ser possível apresentar o meu projecto na sala tive de recriar a situação, projectando os elementos extra numa foto.

As imagens foram todas convertidas para 3D, por isso foi muito engraçado a forma como as pessoas interagiam com o meu projecto pois elas tinham de usar óculos 3D para visualizar as imagens com mais realismo. No fim foram seleccionadas várias categorias para os trabalhos e o meu foi eleito "the most amusing" :)

On the last day it was time for the final crit. It was quite amusing for me the way we had to present it - we had like 6 rows of tables where we would put our projects, and then we would walk in groups and comment and present the projects. It was quite fantastic to see tons of different approaches to the same subject, which shows that for each project there are literally a million ways to develop it!

My project was based on the idea of recreating the riverside view of Thames throughout the years. I was quite surprised, after doing my research, of the major importance of the river to the development of London...and I was quite inspired by the sentence "The river Thames is liquid history". So my ideia was to recreate London at XIV / XV centuries, present and future.

Ideally the idea was to do an art installation by the riverside, where there would be transparent screens where images of different elements would be projected on it, recreating the river view. It would be like a "layer", where it would have the river on the back, and the person would see it through the screen so that he would see it with the extra elements. It´s quite hard trying to describe it in words...

Anyways...as the idea was to present in room in Saint Martins, I had to project the images onto a riverside picture of Thames.

In the final there was a kind of animation being projected into the picture, recreating London throughout the time. The images were converted into 3D, so people would have to use 3D glasses. It was quite funny seeing my colleges grabbing the glasses and having fun watching the little animation. At the end, several categories were made, where they would select different projects for each of them...mine won the "most amusing" category :)

(my project was the one being projected onto the wall)

(a cute illustration book by a french girl)

(um frame da projecção sobre a foto de Londres à beira rio, recriando o século XIV)

(A frame of the projection onto the riverside London photo, recreating the XIV century)