overwriting

Pavel Buchler

day after day after day

I think I need to find somewhere to work. Somewhere I can make a mess and talk to myself. My bedroom is getting smaller and smaller and I'm losing focus. No, correction, I cant find focus! My tutorial with Melissa are like a booster shot. I leave completely inspired and focused then I forget it all. I need to find a system that helps me get out all that information and follow the paths we discuss!!

exquisite pain

I am Sophie Calle, just 24 years too late. She is a french artist who completed my project the year I was born. Crap. Not exactly but close. She is still wonderful though.

She was waiting for her lover to meet her in New Dehli on January 24th 1985 but he never showed. He was in hospital with a gamy finger. She was dumped the next day unceremoniously over the phone, a red phone.

Sophie returned to France and decided to start the healing process by using her experience and asked friends, family and others when they had suffered most. She then used their accounts to put her own suffering into perspective. The result was a book, split into "before unhappiness" and "after unhappiness"





the images in "before unhappiness" were of her scholarship to Japan, I wonder what she would have done with the images if there hadn't been an "after".













Sophie's passage is on the left, it changes on every page with varying details about the moment of unhappiness, each accompanied by the image of the red phone in the room where it happened. The text fades and becomes shorter over the passing of time, the time it takes for her to get over it and accept it. The image remains the same.

With repetition as necessity I am not repeating the images to get over it or accept it, I dont want them to fade or change either, they are there to remind me that it happened.

So I intend to respond...by writing my account over the course of a few weeks to see the result, I respond to text. It is my way toward images.

repetition as necessity

My final major project is based on repetition. Or more, my necessity to repeat.
I have been thinking about the ways in which I repeat: counting steps, repeating words or phrases, dates, times, hours, my systems of behaviour, and most prominently the way I replay scenes and conversations from times of trauma in my mind. Over and over and over and over. The scenes come in flashes, sharply changing to the next image and occasionally lingering.

My dad lying in the bed at Margie's house.
My 7 year old brother sitting in the pew beside me picking at a tissue.
My 25 year old brother on the alter looking up to the sky.
My mum and her friend standing on the hill.
The rope to lower him.

In my tutorials with Melissa I've been trying to figure out why I do this, and where I should take it. Freud comes up alot, his theory that we repeat as a method of coping with trauma, and by doing so we accept and get over it. I dont believe that is what I am doing by repeating. I truly believe that I repeat to remember that it happened. If I dont replay these scenes then I will forget, I have forgotten! Its a way to make sure that I remain in reality and not in a dream world where he is still there and I've just not gone to visit. Therefore, Repetion as Necessity.

It is neccesary to preserve the memory.
It is neccesary to keep the facts correct.
It is neccesary to make sure I dont forget.
It is neccesary so I can remember to tell Ross.
It is neccesary so I realise that it happened.

miss van

I've been working on my final major project but for now.....

M.V.A "RED CHEEKS" COLLECTION 2009 from mydogispolite on Vimeo.