Hello! My residency has not truly begun yet - I have been a bit of a vagabond here in Coventry, getting to know the people and places before settling into the Lanchester gallery tomorrow and starting to work with Lucinda and Eleonora on Tuesday. I am looking forward to using this blog as a repository of fragments of writing and video that are accumulated in the next couple of weeks.

To get started, something I wrote in my journal yesterday . . .

Day 1
Today is the first day that I have been able to move in a dance studio and feel like I have arrived. My body is filled with tightness and creaks after a week of being on the road and away from my routine.

The studio has a confusing lighting system that seems to shut off periodically. I think it might be set up with a motion detector system and I quite like it. It is asking me to consider the relationship of vision, motion and presence. I like being unexpectedly plunged into darkness as if I do not exist if I do not move.

I hadn't realized until Tuesday that this is where Lady Godiva is supposed to have ridden through town nude to stop the oppression of the people by her husband. There is a statue of her in the center that is labeled 'self-sacrifice.' Interesting that that statue was put up in 1949, in the middle of Coventry, in the middle of Enlgland. What does self-sacrifice mean then and now?

The statue turns us all into peeping toms.

In her honor, I moved around, just warming up really, while nude.

I am also interested in Coventry's historic relationship to peace and reconciliation and will try to find out more. In a church there is a plaque commemorating the Falklands war that says "These nations shall learn war no more'.

It seems we are still learning war.