The story of my ARTventure

Assessed Presentation (Demonstration of the learning outcomes)

When I started looking for the organisation to do my placement, one of the very first websites that I visited was the Freud Museum in London. I didn’t look much further, maybe just enough to make sure that this was the right choice for me. I appreciate Freud and his work and I am still interested in reading his theories, although there are many more contemporary psychologists that have dismissed many of his theories, I enjoy reading his more because that was the beginning of a new department. Many of his theories were bold and his techniques could be considered questionable because that was the only way for people to consider something that at the time would be so crazy, but for me it’s so interesting that he created a whole new invisible world that has given the answers to so many questions and has explained so many phenomena.

Screenshot from Freud Museum's web site, collection of blogs page

Screenshot from Freud Museum’s web site, “What’s on” page.

After I explored the website and find everything that drew my attention for any reason I came up with a plan. My plan was to go into a psychoanalytic journey, my odyssey, and analyse it in this blog. Along the way I only posted what I felt comfortable talking about and what was absolutely necessary for the understanding of my artworks. I am highly influenced by my surroundings because everything affects me, my behaviour and psychology. At the beginning of the placement, I was hopeful and I wanted to use this process to express and overcome any of these problems that affect me. A major issue is that because of the pandemic, my perception has changed abruptly; I am less driven and less hopeful and more sensitive (in a bad way, in the way that makes you “close” your eyes and ears whenever you feel like something is too much and you cannot deal with it).

Table of project content with references to the Freud Museum website.

Table of project content with references to the Freud Museum website.

So hardly enough, this is a period of time that I managed to make myself go into a deeper level of understanding myself, which is a “painful” and unhappy process. That was the main challenge for me, to find a way to explain and express my feeling without bringing myself down. The way I worked through this project was divided in 4 parts. firstly, I would go to my list of interesting pages in the Freud Museum website and I would pick the one that I could associate with more at that period of time. Then, after reading, listening and exploring everything in that page, I would start writing how that makes me feel and how I relate to that, followed by brainstorming on how to best express this in an artwork or process of making an artwork. The third step was to make the artwork and keep notes along the way and finally, I would upload it to the blog and analyse everything that would also help me notice how to make it easier the next time.

When I started making work, it was a week before I had to fly back to Brighton from Greece, I had to finish the artwork for the Ogygia, at least so that I could then use the digital photos to make the blog page form Brighton, leaving behind the actual piece. Weirdly enough, that was more difficult than expected. I had to think back, to use my notes and I also had a video call with my mom so that she would show me the art piece in video. I think that in a way I lost my connection with the artwork when I left, not being in the space where it was made it seemed more like a memory than anything else. On the other hand, that feeling also created an interesting new approach that I also used in the explanation and making of the blog page. It made the balloons move for me, like when you are little and you watch it disappear in the sky, which also sums up the feeling I have on my birthday.

(the first artwork) “The happiness you almost forgot about.”

After that, I started making the artwork for Telepylos at that time, I was quarantining in Brighton, in an almost empty house, since I would be moving right after the quarantine was over. I was feeling trapped in my own mind because I wanted to make work and that would also help with the passing of my time but I couldn’t bring myself into using any of the art supplies I had in the house, maybe because I hadn’t used them in so long, they seemed outlandish to me, like I wasn’t allowed to use them (I usually have this feeling whenever I change countries). So I tried to use only what I found there, anything that seemed abandoned and not used. But again in a way these materials took a different form through my eyes when I started using them, they became important and alive and it was much easier writing about something with an aura, a soul.

Still photo of the installation "The shimmering light of life that covers death"

(The second artwork)Still photo of the installation “The shimmering light of life that covers death”

Now this is where the interesting part begins. Although I used and referenced my feeling and approaches through the making of the whole project, I didn’t feel like it took the form of a psychoanalytic process until I wrote the conclusion, Aeolia. In a way, at this point I stopped “pretending” to myself that this whole process had a bold and noticeable outcome and I accepted the fact that this was the beginning of a bigger journey of psychoanalysis through art. The whole project, might not be successful in the way that I hoped but it is in a different and, in my opinion better, more realistic way. For starters, I accepted the fact that I was not in a position to overcome and to share my actual and really important psychological obstacles in such a short period of time. Secondly, I made myself go through smaller anxiety causes that could be addressed in such limited time and taking into consideration the circumstances, that actually helped me drop and leave behind some of my thoughts. Lastly, I learned how to built a blog, taking into consideration the user’s experience, that will always come in handy in the digitally depended world that we now live in.

Even though I am satisfied with the outcome of the project in a general view, If I could go back in time, there would still be a couple of things that I would try to do differently. For example, I would force myself to leave my comfort zone, if we can consider any of the current situation as a part of anyone’s “comfort zone”, meaning that I would maybe bring myself to use my art supplies at least for experimentation, or to try and make some more (non-written) artworks before the end of the project. Finally, Using a blog was a new experience for me and I gave more attention to the working and orientation parts of the blog, without suggesting that it doesn’t properly work this way, maybe it would be interesting to also try and balance out the process of making the work to go on the blog with the blog as a platform for this work.