I've found lots of ideas and done lots of things for this project so far ... but realised I didn't have "stories" for it .... Well, I could say creating atmospheres and images can be telling stories ... but I didn't recognise myself in Susan's stories, I was finding them far from me ...
Susan :
"I think about the extreme situations- women who send their sons and daughters away to foreign countries so that their children have better lives, women who have lost husbands, children and parents in wars they did not choose to be part of, and yet were, women who live half lives enslaved in the sex trade, women who cannot feed their families because they have no resources to do so. I also think about the situations I experience which are more decadent, less extreme perhaps- the ebbing away of time, the loss of my friends, mourning for life experiences I will never have now, the corrosive aging of the ones I love. In some ways all of these experiences are marginalised- put to one side as not really the matter for serious debate or study- not real politics/ power- not the BIG questions."
I've started boycotting TV a couple of years ago (and that's the same for any news actually)... for many different reasons, one being that seing or hearing about any kind of violence affects me too deeply and I've got other things to do : I can't cry and recover from the pain every time I hear something bad about the world, it takes me too much time and energy ! I feel I already know it all ... nothing can surprise me in that area.
At the beginning, I would feel guilty and selfish of cutting myself from the News, but now I think there's no time for self-blaming neither : I should just accept these facts about myself, that it is the way I am.
And I am an artist.
The pain is there in me. I don't try to hide from it.
I use it in my work. This is my job. This is the way I carry my part of burden.
The pain is in me, accessible at any time.
I cannot just possibly keep crying all day long.
That's the way I deal with all that.
