So, I've been encountering a few difficulties in moving forward with my project. My first difficulty has been finding a space. The large majority of Centennial Scholars do their projects at one of a few locations on campus. Because these locations are used for tons of different events and activities, they do not really meet my needs. I want an empty box that I can fill and shape. I know that Prentis, a building used primarily by the Graduate School of the Arts on 125th street has a lot of wonderful empty spaces, but I'm not sure how I would go about securing a room there. I have sent emails to the people I think might be able to help me, so we'll see if that works out. If it doesn't, I really don't know where else on campus I would be able to do my project.

Except! I just had a brilliant idea! If the thing with Prentis doesn't work out, I might be able to create my own space. All of the Villages (what they called the dorm buildings at the university where I was staying in Senegal) had these little enclaves made of sticks that served as prayer venues. The picture at the head of my blog is of a sign that each enclave has outside it to say when the call to prayer is during the day. It might be much more difficult, but may be really interesting if I created my own space outside that mimicked this prayer space. That would cohere with the thematic content I have envisioned for the installation. Logistically, this seems extremely ambitious, just because I would have to construct the thing myself and that seems like a big and mysterious project, but I'll keep it in mind if I can't find another space inside a building.


The second problem I am dealing with is super meta, because it is actually this blog. I know that this virtual space is mostly for myself, and the few other people who might read it (who are probably related to me or involved in my project), so I shouldn't be so self-conscious about it, but I am having difficulty grappling with the self-revealing nature of the blog. I think in attempting to keep this blog I am realizing that this whole project has the potential to become something just about me and my experience, which is not really what I want. Instead of just sharing the things that happened to me with the audience, I want to create an experience for them. I think that my personal experiences give the project a grounding in reality, and will provide something concrete amid the fairly abstract construction that I have conceived, but I don't want people to come to my presentation and think that I am just trying to tell them about what happened to me. I am much more interested in putting people in situations like those that I was in, even if in a weirdly arty, abstracted way, to give them an opportunity to feel the way I felt, or feel something completely different in the face of a similar circumstance.

I guess what I am discovering is that I haven't articulated clearly enough what I want my audience to come away with, but the problem is that I have -- up until now -- purposefully left that ambiguous. I have already discussed that one of my goals is for this to be rough around the edges, for the pieces to clash as much as they mesh, but because of that I can't figure out how to keep my wits about something that is supposed to be confusing. I also wonder if I am too concerned with the audience, and maybe I should just construct the pieces of this puzzle the way I want them, without thinking about their reception, because part of what interests me is that I don't know how this will be received and I want to leave it open to interpretation.

I know I am in the messy middle of a process and it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I think that it is good that I am getting all of the problems I am seeing out in the open so I can strategize ways to solve them, or decide that they don't need solving, as I solidify or fill in the other elements.