Federico Clavarino

False Starts

Looking back into my notebooks I often stumble across ideas for future projects. They are usually scribbled down hastily, in the kind of frenzy that possesses one when they are hit by an idea that feels great. At other times the writing seems more hesitant, accompanied by question marks and side-notes. Has someone else done this already? Is it too easy, too predictable? Is it just plain silly? Most of these ideas ended up being forgotten, as I get absorbed by other projects and things to do. There is something marvellous about them, though, and I think it has to do with their potential. How is it that the starting point, the pulsating core of an entire body of work, years of obsessive shooting, editing and thinking, can reside in four of five words sloppily jotted down in the corners or margins of a page, sometimes oddly squeezed in between other notes? So much potential in such a tiny gesture. So many ideas that will, more often than not, never go beyond that form. That is, until today. This workshop, in fact, will consist of working from a selection of these notes.

In 1994 the journalist and critic Janet Malcolm wrote an article about the work of painter David Salle. The text, titled “Forty-one False Starts”, consists of forty-one fragments, each one of them the beginning of a longer piece the author abandoned to start again and follow another path. Each of these fragments represents a possible starting point, another possible perspective. Yet these do not cancel each other out, as they only make sense in their combination. Our goal in this workshop will be to achieve something similar: a series of starts, of different approaches to the same initial prompts.

I expect the workshop to be useful both for those seeking to start something new, who might be looking for new possible starting points, and for those who want to open up to different methodologies to inject new life into existing projects of solve the problems they are facing while working on them by adopting another perspective. There is a lot we can learn by looking at each other while we approach similar problems. This is great opportunity for me to watch how other practitioners engage with ideas I had and that I never worked at. The workshop is going to be extremely practical, but also infused with a sprinkling of more theoretical considerations. Image-making sessions are going to be followed by collective feedback and accompanied by moments in which I am going to share something about my own working methods and considerations.