next.

Great Wallpaper series was conceived during the Cemeti residency. My next plan is to make the fourth in the series with video.

I have noticed how during the process of doing the murals, the OHP projection would also fall on my ladder and on the pedestals that I use to put my watercolour bowl. Imagine that there’s one white pedestal put in a distance off the wall, and imagine that there’s a hole in the pedestal, facing the wall. In the hole there’s a TV monitor playing something. The lights coming out of the TV monitor will illuminate the wall – you might only be able to read the mural with the help of this illumination. The back of the white pedestal (where there’s no hole) will have part of the mural.

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The hotel where I stayed in Clermont-Ferrand was quite interesting. My pinoy friends, perhaps being so obsessed with gangster films (somehow I always think of Khavn like this, I have no idea why), pointed out that there’s a bullethole on the glass window right above the entrance.

Most interesting for me was, in fact, my room. I played around with the phone – an old-fashioned phone where you drag and release your numbers around a wheel (instead of push-on buttons). It looked so nice with the brownish carpetish wallpaper design. I have some footage of this.

A footage that I wish I would have taken was a footage of my arms’ shadows on the wall, dancing to the French music-videos. Movie trailers during the break. Then black French hiphop rappers with female vocalists. With those on TV, I turned the lights off, positioned my body in a way that I could see only the shadows of my arms on the wall, and just moved to the music. It was really interesting to study how each cut in the music video casted a different colour and shade of light onto the walls. With each cut, each movement of my arms was translated into a different location and a different angle on the wall. It looked as though I was always moving around.

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Maybe the video in the white pedestal for my next Great Wallpaper mural would simply be such shadowplay. It would be interesting that the shadowplay will in fact create another shadowplay on the wall that the TV will be illuminating.

Let’s see.