TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

1:33 PM
Posted by jodi rose

"when you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's easter time too
... when your gravity fails ...

it's either fortune or fame
you must pick up one or the other
though neither of them are to be what they claim"

theme song for today (tom thumb's blues, highway 61 revisited)

Happy Spring Equinox!!

Looking forward to this week's round of installations:

One of the French friends' gorgeous Canadian artist Catherine Bolduc at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien on Thursday: 'My life without gravity'

- perfect, that could be the slogan for our strange floating life -

The French finissage takes place on Saturday, and in between maybe some kind of performative lecture, a late Easter dinner for which Som has promised to make Macedonian cheese pie and I will whip up a Schwarzwalderpavlova (just needs a french influence to be truly multi-cultural), and possibly some kind of artist talk on Saturday.

It's snowing this morning, in tiny powdery crystals, Som dragged me out into the freezing air at 1am to say, 'Come and see, the snowflakes look exactly like they do in the picture books!'. So cool. We've started the unofficial 'parasite residency' series, taken from Alison's umbrella project, which fits perfectly with the French philosophy gallery take-over.

Spring blossoms from the Firecafe on veteranenstrasse, up the hill on my morning walk. This time of year feels good, you have a sense of surviving winter and things being about to change. There's still a chill in the air, but daffodils and crocuses are flowering, and blossoms in white and purple give my heart a little burst of joy every time I see them.

New projects in the wind, let's see where they will take us next... thinking Istanbul, Lisbon and back to the Danube (after Paris, Spain & Singapore with Syd/Melb thrown in somewhere between)

Talking about new beginnings, and how my one skill in life is learning very young the art of 'letting go and moving on.' I do it phenomenally well. Which is hardly surprising, given that we lived in 12 housed before I reached the age of 12, and I went to 5 different primary schools. That kind of thing gets hard-wired into you by that age. It's a very useful talent, and I'm incredibly grateful for the nomadic upbringing. Although that may be partly why I keep waking up and thinking with a sudden shock 'everything's gone, we're moving again'.

Now that I've learned to stay sometimes, and go back whenever I can to retrace the steps along the way, the world is amazingly small and filled with friends and oases. Think I'm going to build a bridge to the floating lands with the French, and move the bridge activities into a more deep local on-site practice, along with the virtual sound maps.

Time to arrange all that travel other people are paying for ;)
This life really is SO ridiculous, it doesn't bear thinking about.

Although I had a lovely email from someone writing a 'thematic high school curriculum' for their education studies, asking if they could include my work - and life - as part of their course on personal mythology and mythopoeia. Gorgeous, I wish I'd had something like that to study, but then we each find out our own way in time.

My Life as a Conceptual Artwork.