*Brace yourself for the complete story of my mid-term project*
When Regan started explaining the mid-term drawing project of reinterpreting a master work, I immediately thought of Leonardo's sketches for the Last Supper. I remembered reading about how he would walk around the city following people, looking for people whose faces and gestures he thought exemplified the personalities of the apostles. He didn't know these people, he just discreetly followed them around the city, trying to make studies of them. I've always been into spying and being sneaky, and by the time Regan was finished talking, I had basically decided for sure that this was what I wanted to do. But I felt that there was really nothing behind it. (Note: I have been shown this week that there doesn't always have to be something behind a work of art if it elicits a strong response in the viewer.) But Regan had specifically asked us, Why do these sketches need to be reinterpreted? Why does this artwork need to be made? I would feel a little silly if someone asked me why I made a work and I said I like to spy on people.
Not that I'm saying that wouldn't be a legitimate concept for a work, but I just couldn't help thinking farther than that. So I started thinking about Judas, and how for the longest time he didn't have a face. DaVinci's commissioner kept pressuring him and pressuring him to finish his painting and daVinci kept searching and searching but Judas's face remained blank.
At this point I was at a bit of a dead-end in my thinking, so I started to consider something else I was interested in, immigrants in Italy. Last semester the director of the film L'Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio came to campus and explained some of the tensions between native Italians and immigrants, and it reminded me a bit of what I'd heard in the news about immigration controversy in our country. He said that the concept behind the film was for immigrants in Rome (where much of the controversy is) to create something beautiful and try to show people in the city more than the itty bitty fraction of immigrants they hear about on the news who lead one to make negative associations with the various populations.
And I was thinking about how Michele, the police officer who visited us during orientation, kept saying that illegal immigrants were "ghosts" to the police. They don't have ID, fingerprints, documents, or anything on them. So then I felt this tenuous connection between the two ideas, apostles Leonardo needed to find faces for and people the police needed to find faces for.
I felt like I had hope, but Jana and Regan still had questions for me: how do I present this material sensitively, so I'm not objectifying my subjects? They both said that there's a need to put myself in the work, but how? I don't know any illegal immigrants. I've met two immigrants total. And how can I identify with them? I don't get discriminated against on the level that they do, although I should "belong" here less, considering the amount of time I'm here for, the fact that I'm only a visitor, I don't have a family here. In Jana's words, I would be speaking about them from a more "privileged" position. What gives me the authority to do that?
So what I had was the opportunity to do some really hypocritical work. My original plan had been to sketch people while trying to infer something of their personalities like I thought Leonardo did, and then black out certain faces to represent the residents of Italy without documentation? But I couldn't do that without jumping to conclusions about people, trying to judge whether they belonged without having met them, which is something that Michele told us was impossible anyway.
So... last night I forwent (Is that a word?) my daily run and sat in my room with my back against the really warm radiator, reading BBC articles on immigration in Italy. What I learned:
- according to the head of one of the research organizations, the majority of illegal immigrants are actually French or Austrians who have been unable to renew residency permits
- Romanians are the largest immigrant group in Italy (I think this means legal immigrant group), followed by Albanians, Moroccans, Chinese, Ukrainians, Philippinos, and Tunisians. I think that this list may differ between immigrants and people with work permits, though. The guy I met at the laundromat I think was only here as a seasonal worker.
- There has recently been emergency legislation in response to several high-profile rape cases involving immigrants that includes harsher deportation policies, I think--but for sure in the legislation there is specific reference to immigrants--which can send the message to the public that it is the immigrants in general who are the problem. This has spurred the Vatican to issue a warning to the Italian government to be careful of passing laws that might promote hostile feelings in the public towards immigrants.
- There have also recently been attacks on Roma camps--in Rome and other cities they don't live in the city center with other Italians but in camps by themselves--and on innocent individuals. The Roma are an ethnic group in Italy, many from Romania and some from other eastern European countries, commonly referred to as gypsies. Before I started researching immigration I would always see the word "Rumeni" I think in the paper, with other words having to do with court and crime. I think it was about one of these court cases, but maybe I still have the papers.
- While the Roma live separately, the children attend Italian schools and many (I don't know if it's the majority or how much 'many' is) are fluent in Italian. However, children born and raised by foreign parents are not automatically Italian, so there is an awkward kind of situation for these children who are a good part Italian but not citizens.
- As I understand it, the 2 main parties in the national government are center-right and center-left. The center-right has a much harsher view of immigrants and is the government in control now. Many of them live in the north, and there is an organization associated with them called the "Northern League," I'm not sure of the specifics of the relationship, that I believe specifically is concerned with immigration policy. The center-left party, on the other hand, includes the first black member of Parliament, who is also from the Congo and I think is himself an immigrant. I could check. (Random thought: what do the center-right members of the gov't think about the son of a foreigner to the States becoming president? Because I've never ever heard of an Italian who dislikes Obama. Would they say that it's different in the States, or they secretly dislike him, or something I haven't thought of?)
So I went to bed with this kind of broad base of new knowledge behind me, and this morning I woke up thinking about The Last Supper again. How do I relate these two ideas? How do I put myself into this? And the relationship I found to all this was a relationship to the Italians. I'm here reading all these news stories just like they are. (Sort of.) I'm isolated from immigrants at least as much as they are, I'm trying to be an empathetic human being and understand the people around me who I interact with on the bus, even if it's just the decision of whether or not to offer my seat, understanding when to move out of the way, or when to make eye contact, ask "Scende?" or smile. Like everyone else, I want to make people around me happy.
But just having that intention isn't good enough. Everyone who's had Psych at WashU has learned about the IAT test on the Harvard website that shows how almost everyone has unsettling biases toward certain groups of people over others. For example, most people--regardless of race--associate white faces more with the words with positive connotations and black faces more with words with negative connotations. Because of the effect on all races and anonymous questionnaires on conscious feelings, it's been established that these biases are independent of conscious attitudes. But what a load of guilt that is! Not only am I biased towards more favorable impressions of European-looking faces, I'm biased to associate women more with domestic life and men more with career life! One conclusion drawn from this study, especially considering the data from the participants biased against themselves, was that these unconscious biases reflect associations built up from all the experiences of a certain kind associated with a certain group of people. For example, if I watch a few hours of a news program that shows mug shots of people of the same race or haircut or color eyes or all with a mole above their left eyebrow, I will build up subconscious negative feelings toward people with that characteristic--even if I know with my brain that not everyone with a mole above their left eyebrow is a criminal. So the next time someone with a mole above their left eyebrow smiles at me on the street, I'll be less likely to return the gesture.
For me, this is very unsettling. I'm not in complete control of my actions; my chance encounters, and which articles I happen to glance over in the newspaper, and what I hear from other people about certain other people have more influence than I would like. And everyone who is exposed to some common form of communication--the City newspaper, for example--develops some kind of association whenever a certain group of people, like Romanians, is mentioned in a certain context.
So I see my subject becoming the trap that I feel myself in, along with everybody else whose perceptions of other people are altered in this way. (Which seems to be everybody.) My subject isn't anymore these groups of people I don't know and can't find a way to identify with, but I think it's more myself and this guilty feeling.
The fact that I don't have a clue how to tell an immigrant from an Italian is actually quite interesting to me, and I think I can use it in my work. Because not only can't I tell an immigrant from an Italian, but I also can't tell a "good" person from a "bad" person, because my mind is clouded by these biases. I can observe people like Leonardo, and hope to capture in my sketches what they're feeling at the moment, but there's no way I can learn anything for sure about their history or their personality. This is where my contemporary interpretation differs from the master work, because Leonardo spent days and days trying to find a face that looked evil enough to be Judas. I'm saying from the beginning there will be no face there, and the real "evil" seems to me to be the influences that the newspaper and other forms of mass communication have on us as a society.
I hope that all of this is intelligible, because this was the first time I've written down what I've been thinking, and it's not exactly the most concise that it could be. But at least now I'm not in the place of knowing that my ideas don't work, and I'll have something to think about when I'm on the bus today with my sketchbook. Rest of the pictures here I'm only allowed 3 sets, so I moved last week's.
Oh yeah. I forgot to say that the reason it's interesting to me that I can't tell the immigrants is because I think it'll help me get the personalities that I see there and not be distracted by these biases, which I haven't had much time to build up yet because I'm a newcomer in a foreign country. We'll see how it goes.
