Symbols and Narratives

I emailed Kate to ask her if artists were ethnographers with different outputs? Does this fit in with Davids idea of artists being socially engaged? Eric Knowles was a real star. I'm now off to Madrid to work for a week -Just got back from a weekend in Amsterdam. Wandering around the streets at about 3 in the morning we came across a massive prosession of people walking in a series of continous lines and looking very solemn. Apparently it was an annual Catholic Vigil to commemorate a miracle in the 13th century. A child had taken communion and the host had entered the bread - he had vomited and the sick had burnt away leaving the bread which still contained the host untouched. Thousands of elderly people walking around and around at 3 in the morning.

I found the south African stuff at Kates conference really interesting. It reminded me of the museum being very careful about telling people their own history- perhaps this is why much of the recent stuff gets told in the first person and relies on individual testement more. So today I'm going to think about the difference between the recent and the distant. Are the people marching around to commemorate an event 700 years ago or to commemorate marching last year.

I'm learning a lot about multiple meanings and how to use them through this work. It's going to be hard to pull together a piece of work which communicates these ideas. I think I will stop talking about Symbols and start talking about context and meaning as this is perhaps clearer and closer to what a museum tries to do.