THE LAST ONE: 11/08/2007. Venice. Bill Viola: Ocean without a Shore.

There was this exhibit that was near San Marco by this guy named Bill Viola. It was in a very small chapel that I just happened upon. In the chapel there were set up three elongated screens on each wall. It was one of the best exhibits I saw all weekend. I sat there for at least half an hour or more watching the videos. What they were was videos of people whom you could see at a distance and were all in black and white. One screen at a time the people would approach you and walk through a curtain of water. As they did this they turned into color. Once they had stepped through the curtain of water, they didn’t talk. They just stood there, each doing something a little different. And then they turned around, went back through the water and immediately turned black and white again and disappeared. It was an incredibly moving piece. After about five minutes I began to understand that these people were representatives of the dead and that by going through the curtain of water they were for some reason given the chance to come back to the world of the living, if even for only a few minutes. But they must not talk. Anything they wanted to convey had to be done through the eyes and facial expressions. It was a very powerful piece.

I really could have stayed there and watched it for many hours. It was the human condition at its finest and yet different because these people were no longer inhabitants of human bodies. And although each one seemed to have a reason for coming back for a few minutes, they were quite resigned to the fact that they would have to go back and some even looked thankful about it, as if all the memories of their bodily life suddenly came back to them, and they wanted nothing more than to just leave them behind. And then imagine all these thoughts and feelings coming to you all while sitting in this tiny chapel surrounded by religious iconography. It was oddly calming, watching these people go back and forth between the human world and the other one. I really wish everyone could have seen this project because it was an exhibit that was in no way political. It was more about experiencing something and about evoking some type of feeling, independent to each person that watches it.

As far as the program goes as a whole, I really enjoyed it and I am glad that I had the opportunity to be involved with it. I have had the chance to see so more art in the last month than most people get to see in their lives. Not only the art that I have learned about in art history class but also all the contemporary art that we had the chance to look at. For me personally, it was the contemporary stuff that really made the experience in Italy worth it. I still really like and was impacted by all the “old” stuff, but it’s the contemporary stuff that has given me ideas to think about and is what has made me excited to get back to Oregon and start making more art. I still have 4 more months in Italy and I think I am going to try my hardest to start thinking about projects and starting on some of them while I am here. It has been such an exciting time for me and I am really glad I got to experience it with a ton of really cool people, some of whom I will definitely maintain friendships with after this, which is great because I did not know anyone in the digital arts program prior to this trip.

I am also very pleased with the project that we came up with. I am not saying it wasn’t a struggle and that it wasn’t quite frustrating at times. But that struggle and that frustration, I think, is what made the project so strong in the end. We have argued and bickered and disagreed about a lot of things, but we were still able to come up with something that turned out to be an amazing experience. Had the project come to us easily, and without much hassle I don’t think we would have appreciated the process as much as most of us do now. Personally, I have never collaborated on anything with anybody before and I am pretty sure that this is true of most of the people in the group. I feel like the whole process was a great learning experience. So maybe we went about things rather backwards, maybe we shouldn’t have fought as much, maybe we should have gone around in the beginning and seen how everyone felt about the project. But we didn’t. There is nothing we can do about that now. But we know for next time, and hopefully there will be a next time for a lot of us. I feel like you learn a lot when you have to work collaboratively. Even if you don’t do it so well the first few times, I really think that it is that process that you have to go through and that if you ever want to work in a collaborative, you have to go through what we did. You have to work out the kinks and figure what works for your group of people. It took us a long time to do this, but I think in the end we accomplished what we initially set out for.