When I first heard that our task for Project Brief 3 was to interview an artist that had worked with Testing Grounds and make a 5-7 minute doco on them, I was super excited! I love doing that kind of thing but haven’t really done too much of it before. We were put into groups of three and each assigned an artist, ours being Arie Rain Glorie, which just happens to be a super artistic name. In that first lesson that we received Brief 3, I had a quick research of who Arie was and he turned out to be a video projection artist not too much older than ourselves.
Over this semester we’ve been obviously focusing on site and how meaning can be derived from a particular site or non-place in different ways. We found out that Arie curated an exhibition at Testing Grounds in order to counteract the idea that exhibitions should be held in a specific place like a gallery. I thought this tied in well with Bachelard’s chapter ‘The House. From Cellar to Garrett. The Significance of the Hut.’ In it Bachelard talks about our attachment to a particular place, specifically our homes. Although this project brief is very different from analysing our ‘first universe’, the concept tied in well in the sense that Arie was trying to challenge the idea of attachment to a certain place such as a gallery and replace it with a non-place such as Testing grounds. And in looking at the result, he was quite successful and plans to curate another exhibition at Testing Grounds next year.

My group and I mostly discussed things for our project in a group chat on FB. It was often hard to organise meet up times where all 3 of us were available so this way worked best for us. We all individually researched Arie and his works so that we knew what he was about and grasped a feel for his works. We gathered that Arie’s works were all quite simplistic yet the ideas behind them were quite complex. For example his video ‘Ascension of the Fool’ displays a long shot of a man trying to climb a ladder without it leaning against anything and he continues to fail. The video is intercepted with shots of flying birds. When I first watched this I really had no clue what it was about. So we made sure to ask Arie the meaning behind it in his interview. As it turns out, the film is about fear of failure and taking flight I guess both metaphorically and physically.

Nicolette couldn’t make it to the conducting of the interview so Gianna and myself headed to Arie’s studio at RMIT with a load of equipment and set the interview up. We had a list of question that we’d all compiled which I thought would help a lot. However, I don’t think it did. I mean yes, it meant we were well prepared but it also meant that the way I interviewed Arie broke the flow of conversation and ease because I had to keep going back to my list of questions and checking what was next and what I’d already asked. I think I would’ve preferred to just have sat down with Arie and previously memorised some questions to ask him. I feel like that probably would’ve made him more comfortable with the situation also.

But on the other hand, when we watched all the footage back, we had 18 minutes worth of responses from him, which was more than enough to work with.

To make up for not being there for the interview and filming, Nicolette did most of the editing and she did a really great job. Obviously she consulted us a lot of the time and we put in our ideas and thoughts too. I kind of wish we had used footage from Testing Grounds to break up the standard ‘sitting in a chair’ interview stereotype though. We did attempt to go to testing Grounds and film, but every time we tried it was raining and impractical for everyone. We did use footage of Arie’s works though and this looks great combined with his interview.

Overall Nicolette, Gianna and myself had a pretty good group dynamic. We were all quite diligent and on task with everything. We solved problems well and communicated effectively with one another too. I’m really glad this was the case because there’s nothing worse than being stuck with a group that don’t work well.