This is a work continued by exploring Marcia’s food from action 6. I virtually placed all her food in plates and my initial thought was to tell a story for her plate. I thought about creating a story which is related to Marcia’s feeling every day, by looking at her food and counting on my intuition to guess the taste of the food as well. But instead I decided to share her food with the cohort and ask them to name each food with a person’s name. That person could be a fictional character, a famous person or a person they know. I also asked whether they can give me some characteristics of that person. They didn’t know that the foods are for Marcia. I wanted to see how they perceive the foods without any knowledge about the person who ate them.
I spend hours and days looking at these characters the cohort gave me. I tried morphing the characters with the food. I looked at each of them to see the reason behind them being selected. The more obvious ones were the ones which had similar appearance with the food such as the texture, form or the color. Some were chosen because of the pleasant/unpleasant taste of the food. Having a memory which is related to that food was a reason for a couple of food/character selection. In a talk with Chiara, one of my classmates who participated in choosing a character, she mentioned that “I could perfectly say that my close friend is an avocado, because she has lots of potential like an avocado”. Another reason for selecting her friend was that they had lots of shared memories with an avocado tree.
People had different feeling for each food. Even people from similar culture have different emotional attachment for a same food. My first idea after receiving the characters was to create a story for Marcia’s plate, but I decided to show the characters to Marcia to see her reaction. She was really excited to see how the cohort perceived her food. I first decided to gave the characters to Marcia and ask her to document her reaction to each of them, but then I decided to do some thing else. I wasn’t in a good emotional place at this moment and I was really confused what to do with all the things that I had so far. I decided to care for myself in this point of the action and don’t pressure myself. I decided to make without thinking. I felt like doing watercolor and embroidery on textile to create a pattern by the characters.
At this point I worked on my perception of the characters. So the final work is the result of different process of perception with a number of people.