The first class of the semester has come to a close. Its hard to believe all that has happened to me in the last month; its hard to believe that I have lived in Italy for nearly a month already!
The third week of Design class our group split in two: half began to work on large drawings from a chosen site in Orvieto, and the other half (my half) began a project of “the city as text.” My first task for this project was to go around the town and find letters. Trees that make an “A”, a sign post that makes a “t” etc…We took pictures and then converted the pictures into linoleum cuts in order to print them. This seems like an easy task, but it took a few very long days of carving to create an entire alphabet! In order to design these “books” of Orvieto, we each wrote a 1001 character description of the Orvieto. The description was poetic and story-like in form, modeled after a selected chapter from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and incorporated our own experiences and observations of Orvieto thus far. These tasks of preparation took of most of our days for Monday through Thursday.
Last Friday we were blessed to visit the city of Assissi. After a busy week of class, this was a wonderful time for rest. We sat in the olive groves, toured the monastery, churches and woods where St. Francis dwelled and stood in awe in front of The Basilica of Saint Francis. The basilica contained St. Francis’ tomb in the lower level and a series of Giotto’s The Life of St. Francis on the upper level.
This past Monday through Friday, our fourth and final week (of Design class) has been a blur of busy activity! I began constructing my book by adding a layer of paint to all my drawings from the earlier weeks of the class and gluing all these drawings together to create a two-sided, 20 x 200 centimeter book, folded into 20 pages. I continued to add more layers of my old drawings and then commenced stamping each letter of my 1001 character description onto the book itself. Just the process of stamping took about 20 hours, spread over two days! After long days working in the studio, our work was finally complete on Thursday. We spent Thursday morning and afternoon critiquing all 20 of the completed projects and held an exhibition in the evening for the members of the town to come view our work. It was a fantastic day of celebration of all the hard work we did throughout the last month. Listening to my peers commemorate my work and find aspects of connection with it that I had not even anticipated was an amazing experience. I have learned so much and grown intellectually in ways I never expected, and I know that I will continue to find ways that this class and this country has impacted me in the years to come. As we wrapped up one class, I couldn’t help but think, “I believe I get to do this three more times during the semester!”
Monday was the celebration of San Guiseppe, Orvieto's patron saint. The town celebrates by mass, a procession of St. Joseph's statue and giving out donuts and wine!
The olive groves of Assissi...
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