Evy

what is the general feeling about the process in your group;
The proces goes well, I feel. We do a lot of research and developing our project every week.

what is the agreed goal at this moment among your group;
We want to make a documentary about sexual violence in relationships

what’s your plan for the midterm: what do you want to achieve.
We are going to arrange interviews, search for footage and shoot footage to create a film.

Sanya

what is the general feeling about the process in your group;
For me this process has been continuously moving forward, with each time
we get feedback we get further. Having lots of interesting conversations, and use
that as a starting off point, diving deeper as we go.What I'm most excited by at this
point is exploring different ways of recording and bringing different media together
to tell the story in a unique way.

what is the agreed goal at this moment among your group;
A documentary about sexual violence in relationships, stemming from
our own personal experience.

what’s your plan for the midterm: what do you want to achieve.
Start an archive of footage, collections, objects, find people to talk to
maybe make a rough outline/highlight the directions/points of interest
e.g: what time in our lives, education, consequences, stigma etc.

Evy - Nice and bad strangers

When I think of the word ‘stranger’ it’s someone I can’t identify with. It’s a men, one who I saw on the news with an black bar before his head or his face blurred. He did something bad, robbed the local supermarket, attacked an innocent teenager or he did something else. He looks like someone who has no house and drinks to much. I can’t identify with this bad man. The strange thing is that I never actually see that man in my surrounding.

In my surrounding I see strangers all the time. The people on the bus, in the supermarket, living in my street. They are all strangers. They often don’t say or do anything, just passing by. I don’t remember all of them, to be honest just a few. Those are the ones who had that great smile, the special eye contact, who came after me after I dropped my wallet, the ones who told me they liked my coat. Those are the strangers, and nobody told me. I had to find out myself.

The strangers where I learned about, from the news, from my mom; who also learned it from the news, want to do bad to me. And maybe it’s dangerous to tell one day to my kids, about the nice strangers. There only has to be one bad stranger and things could go wrong. But I could have a bad day, everything goes wrong and then there is this nice stranger who kindly surprises me with a smile or a simple ‘hello’ and my day get’s a bit better. So what can I learn from the strangers around me? Maybe it’s good idea for myself to say often ‘hello’ or give someone a compliment and it could be that you make their day a bit better and maybe unexpected things will fold out.

Sanya

Unit -1
Before this class I never thought much about the recording of violence. My only concept of it was on the news, where, more often than not, i’d switch of the tv, as these images were too much to take, feeling far away and too close at the same time.

This Unit on the other hand, opened my eyes (for the first time) to the diverse methods of recording, implied in different ways. The forensic architecture group does amazing work, educating, informing and helping survivors, using means of recreating scenarios. This to me, is sort of a backwards way of recording, after the event happened. They make it possible for us to see things unfold as if they were recorded through the eyes of the witness giving a testimony.

What occupied my mind the most was the imperial courts project by Dana Lixemberg. Days later my mind would still wander, thinking about the stories and the people portrayed. The different methods have different impacts, some leave more to the imagination than others. Seeing as this project has been going on continuously it makes clear the care put into it, which, no doubt in my mind, makes this intimate glimpse into their life possible.

The next day we discussed the idea of hierarchies of being in the world, people gathering around the center. What came up in context of colonization was the theme of whiteness. Our position in relativity to other worlds, that lie far from the western perception of ourselves and the world we live in, must be acknowledged with care. Listening questions existing power-structures and breaks them down.
By engaging and learning we might be able to recognize our privileged positions and their view of the world, but must accept that we might never comprehend them fully.

Two different countries, two different languages, two different women and one overlapping experience: sexual violence within an intimate relationship. Ever since we were young we were taught what sexual violence is. Told by the media, films, in sexual education, books, friends and even our parents. Due to this, the projected image of rape was violent and we were told to watch out for strangers.

Therefore we couldn’t understand and recognize sexual violence within the circumstances of our relationships and only realized years later what actually happened. We wanted to make a personal film, where we show our experiences through memories and audio fragments.

To research this topic we mainly used personal conversations as a tool. We shared our experiences and found there where a lot of themes that were overlapping, when it comes to sexual violence. As it goes, the memories of these events are vague, but some details stand out. We want to recreate those memories through light animation and conversations we had or wish we had at the time. It could be conversations in our head or with a friend at the time. Two key sub-themes: the confusion we experienced and how we come to understand the events only after some time has passed (darkness, abstraction). Second, we are recalling our memories through fragments, for example conversations we had with people at the time or little details. (visuals) We hope to get a better understanding in how we processed these events in the past. What it puts forward is to give awareness, that rape is not something that only happens in the dark streets and aims to show the confusion and circumstances of such relationships and the lasting effects. We see this as a starting point for a potential bigger research project.