Construction begins
Myself and most of the rest of the 2nd year students at the DAI have been given the task of helping with preparations for the DAI’s stand at the Kunstvlaai 2008 in Amsterdam. The concept for this, thought up by guest curator James Beckett, was for a large archive of drawers which would document the progress up to now of the Here As The Centre Of The World project.
My part in this was to help with the physical construction of the archive, or specifically with one area which I was particularly enthusiastic about – a system which would make most if not all of the drawers interlinked, so that as one drawer was pulled out, another one somewhere else on the structure would magically slide in, and vice versa. Easier said than done.
I had gone through to Weesp on Friday to see progress on construction, and was quite stressed upon finding that it had not really started. This was a big problem for me, because I couldn’t really start on my part until most of the rest had been completed. Today though things were much further forward, and I was really impressed by what the boys had been doing.
What followed was a backbreaking day of kneeling, sawing, hammering, and drilling, in order to get the mechanism I had foolhardily promised to work. At the end of the day, about half of it was working; not too bad.
Afterwards we sat beside a canal and ate pizza as a strange churning, gurgling sound emanated from some pumping equipment nearby; it’s funny how such a sound can be very relaxing after a day of such hard work.
