Wednesday, March 4, 2009

life in a fruitcrate + the donkey needs a carrot


Dear Sisters!
It has been way too long! I went to my friend Sylvie Macias Diaz's opening at the ISELP in Brussels recently, where she showed more of her compact new style living in fruit crates. It always makes me smile. It is so light and sincere and yet slightly cynical in a non-jaded, teasing kind of way. It is like you could fit a million confusing ideas in those crates and give them all a home and have some peace, so it is very beautiful and soothing to look at in a way. I like my friend. We always have fun when we hang out together. Like her work, she is funny.

The centre has a lovely open plan floorspace which you can see from the walkway above, and Sylvie took it over like the best property developer, and had silhouette drawings of fairytale-like figures climbing up the wall and collages and a slideshow of more silhouettes in a cabin above. Pictured here is an installation she made earlier called Villa Grande. That link will take you to a gallery website which works with a lot of great artists so it's well worth snooping around to see what they've got..

As for the carrot, well: I recently downloaded an extremely addictive game onto my portable-music-device-with-sensitive screen, which is colourful, funny, requires little concentration and is very hard to put down. So now, I have found a new way to keep fit. Exercise bikes can be tremendously boring, as there is no landscape going by, so you concentrate on how tired you are getting. But if you play a game which is this addictive when you are cycling you will find yourself going on forever! Well, almost. I stop when I get a sore behind. I listen to music at the same time and then lose myself without guilty feelings in this ultra useless, yet suddenly very useful game as my feet turn the wheels like a hamster in a cage. This is what I call turning a negative into a positive. Whatever it takes, eh.

I only wish the exercise bike had a dynamo attached to it and then I'd feel really smug about all this movement. In fact I wish there were gyms that generate electricity in this way. Surely somebody out there can create a generator which runs on our sweat. We could get reduced gym membership and cycle for credits which in turn would give us reduced costs for health insurance or come off our electricity bills or simply charge our mobile phones, and then everybody would be happy. At least the planet would. It could become like a kind of civil duty, to both keep fit and contribute something to the electricity net..

It seems the bird that stole my voice these past weeks has given it back again. Until soon dear sisters, love ya.
S2

2 comments:

scatteredsisters said...

Dear sis, it has already been done, see http://www.thegreenmicrogym.com/greenmicrogym.php?itemid=78

Apparently it just about offsets the gas usage needed to get to gym, but every little bit helps.

S1

Anonymous said...

yes but it is not enough; they need to improve the machines and have the power generated going into one machine like Charlie's Chocolate Factory, so it's a joint effort and every office building, shopping centre, community centre should have a gym like that...and then I believe we should all instate a system whereby every birthday that you celebrate you get to plant a tree in a specially designed birthday forest, and instead of presents you'd get the tree and then after a while you'd have a whole forest of your life that you can shelter under when the sun is too hot or when it rains. That's how I see it. S2