Anna: 4.5

Right now I'm in Regan's class working out my ideas for my midterm project. An hour ago I started counting down the time until lunch, but then as I started researching Sophie Calle's early work (who I realized was an artist whose later work we'd already learned about!) about following and spying and trying to tell something about a person without talking to them, I just started thinking a lot and thought it might be good to try to translate my notes into an explanation.
First of all, I'm fascinated by the idea of spying. I was reading parts of her work "The Hotel," where she gets a job as a maid and then photographs and writes descriptions of the rooms, imagining what the people staying there are like. She records her thoughts, what she sees, and then a conclusion she comes to ("My first couple on a honeymoon!").
I love the idea of being able to tell something about someone from watching them or observing their possessions, but I'm also fascinated by what wrong assumptions can be made. Calle was very careful to say 'There was Italian toothpaste,' or 'there was a belt by this Italian designer,' rather than 'the couple was Italian.' Whenever I guess people's nationalities on the bus, I'm surprised by how often I'm wrong.
In my work, I will be sketching people I follow or see on the bus, trying to capture something of their personality. The project is to draw influence from a master work, and mine is Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and his study drawings. He worked a lot with personality, searching Milan for characters who he could imagine as the personalities of the apostles. But in his work, he wasn't trying to say anything about the people he was drawing; he was just collecting facial features that gave him a certain feeling about personalities. My idea deals with the undocumented immigrants in the city, and how to the government they are "ghosts," to use the word of our personal police officer Michele. My idea so far is to collect faces, maybe compose them into a scene or picture like Leonardo, giving them personalities and relationships to other people, but then to somehow erase the identities of certain figures. But I don't want to make judgements about which of these people I should blot out, because I don't know, so choosing which ones to blot out presents a challenge. Point blind-folded?

Good thing I'm not counting down to lunch anymore, because Regan just announced it's a half-hour later than it usually is. Yesssss!

Here's what started my train of thought, I just think it was an interesting situation that happened, and kind of deals with some of what Sophie Calle was saying about chance meetings and how your perceptions of people change upon each encounter.

A couple weeks ago we went out to the discoteca with our house-brother. We were tired of everybody speaking to us in English, so I decided to pretend that we were Russian and spoke no English. Andre' is Ukrainian, and he taught me how to say 'Do you speak Russian?' in Russian. So when we found a guy advertising free drinks in a discobar, we were Russians, and Andre' told him in Italian we're from Siberia. I said we'd come back later to collect on the offer. However: when we returned to the piazza, the guy advertising was British, and we went back with him, speaking English with American accents. But then--while the Brit was taking us back to the bar, we met up with the Italian who thought we spoke no English, and the whole time we were stopped chatting I tried to speak to the one guy so loudly in Italian that he didn't hear the other half of us speaking to the Brit in English. Aaaahhhh!