The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

As far as I could tell our meeting with the tutors yesterday afternoon had gone quite well (although Machteld later told me that she had thought the opposite), and so I began today on something of a high. That said, I was also experiencing that terrifying feeling that can happen when things are going well (or at least OK), the feeling that one false move will bring the whole thing crashing down. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, it is called. At the very least I was worried that our energies had peaked too soon, with several days of the project left to run, and that we would not be able to progress from here.

We began this morning by splitting into two parties, one to take slides of a prominent gate in the city (for another work which we hope to realise tomorrow), while the rest of us went shopping for coloured pigment (due to yesterday’s limited availability…), balloons, and the various other things that would be needed to realise the plans that we had made.

The vague idea with the balloons was to attach them to one or all of the trees in the prison courtyard, perhaps with a message or something similar attached to each one, but due to practical limitations such as the unavailability of helium or a long enough ladder we ended up joining them to only the lower branches of the most suitable (ie photogenic) looking tree.

This in fact produced quite a satisfying result, and the arrival of some small children as with yesterday added to the atmosphere of playful experimentation. It has been said that the aim of the artist is to capture the innocence of a child, and it is a point of view that I am certainly drawn towards; to approach the creation of things and ideas without prejudice and without precondition.

We got the children to experiment colouring the inside of our mini-Diyarbakir with the various coloured pigment powders which we had bought this morning. What was nice was that the results sit very nicely with the balloons in the tree, another happy coincidence which perhaps looked more planned and considered than it really was.

Thanks to Machteld and Mei-yu for some of these photos.

Later we had arranged for a larger group of children to come sing some traditional Kurdish music within the walls of the prison, which would have been quite nice acoustically, but in the end the boisterous little angels were impossible to control and were much happier running around bursting balloons and basically doing what they felt like, which if as an adult you do not aspire to then there is surely something wrong with you.