It’s a bit like speed dating….. a quote from Debra Eck, one of our SCIBASE artists. That was a good analogy of SUPERMARKET. You get xx amount of minutes to give as much information as you can to the public and to fellow exhibitors, swap cards and then hope that they will like you enough to get in touch again.
I feel a bit shell shocked in work today. My body is aching slightly from lugging a heavy case and my head just feels like I’ve absorbed too much information and can’t unravel. I need to get some thoughts down though…. before another project starts and I forget everything that has happened.
So… where do I start? Checking in at Manchester airport last Wednesday and one of our cases being 28kg? We were given a ticking off and told not to do it again, which is pretty amazing. Landing in Stockholm, we decided to head straight to SUPERMARKET to drop off our artwork so we didn’t have to lug it back in the opposite direction towards the hostel. Thankfully, one of our ‘crew’ was already there so we were able to spread the work out and make a start on hanging it.
It is quite difficult to do this, as you’d normally have the luxury of moving work around, trying different spaces and moving away to think about it for a while. We had 3 hours. 3 hours to make half of it presentable enough for any early visitors the next day, the other half spread over the floor so that it could still be viewed. It wasn’t open to the public until Friday, but Thursday was Press day.
Arriving back at 11am the following day after a pretty restless sleep, we were greeted by the South African group already viewing our work in the booth. ‘Why are you not ready?’ they asked. ‘Because we are tired with travelling’ we responded. Pretty stupid response really when we think of our 2 ½ hr flight in comparison to theirs. They muttered something about us going to the pub and wandered off… hmmmm… not a good first impression. But it left us working flat out to complete our booth before any other comments were thrown our way.
