First post from the New YAAC

Welcome for the first time.

Hi, My name's Charlie C-T, I'm 17 and part of the new Yaac group that is based in the Arnolfini in Bristol. Yaac stands for, Young Arnolfini Artists Collective, and is in it's second year, with its second group, if you wish to know any more the Arnolfini, check this link.

And if you want to know anymore about us, or any previous members of YAAC, please take a look at this.

week before last Yaac met on a Wednesday, (as opposed to a Tuesday) to go to the opening of the "In between time festival's" (IBT) opening night. IBT was very interesting and featured performances ranging from a childish dribbling of Skittles onto a white sheet, To ,what I found gross yet intriguing,  air conditioning units filled with water that had been once used to wash corpses before autopsy, take a look at the website for more info on IBT. At first we wandered round for about 10 minutes just taking in the excitement for an opening of an art festival, the first I had ever been to, and then we were called into a room to be assigned a task to do related to IBT.

 I will now take you back about two weeks to explain something, two weeks ago we were told about IBT and told that we were to re-design the Wifi corner of the Arnolfini's Bar/Restaurant. We were asked to draw sketches of what we though would be good for this space and told that one thing that we had to incorporate into our designs was the idea of text running across the walls, around pillars and/or in hard to read spaces.

Back to the opening. we were asked to go out into the opening of IBT by ourself and take in as much of the show as we could in 5 minute intervals. Think about the sights, smells, what we feel towards the art, what we may overhear other people saying about the art, and well, pretty much anything we could think of. After the 5 minutes were up we were called back into the room to write on an A3 piece of paper, all of our ideas, in any way we wanted. personally I drew a (very) loose map of the Anolfini, and placed the things I felt, in the places I felt them. Other people did things like; some sort of word maze, or just a line of words across the page representing one of the works. After going out into the opening about 3 times we had finished our pages and asked to share them, some funny drawings came up and some very interesting text.

The week after the IBT opening we looked back on our A3 peices of paper and chose our favourite lines from them all, and wrote them down, we will then use these to write across the walls.

During the IBT opening we also went out and asked people questions about the art. Not just questions like "do you like this?" but questions that would give us interesting answers, and we wrote these down and took pictures of their face/eye. We did this because when we designed the Wifi corner someone came up with a great idea of taking pictures of people eyes and sticking their comments underneath. Eyes were chosen because this is one of the main logos of IBT. We got some interesting and funny responses from people at IBT, for instance we asked a man about what he though about the felt carpets made from human hair and he answered  "I think it's very resourceful".

Well that's all I'm going to write for this week. Thanks for staying with me for this massive post, but I had to cover the opening weeks of Yaac. hopefully we will have someone new writing next week, because my mind has gone numb...

Thanks again.

Charlie C-T.

YAAC Member (Young Arnolfini Artists Collective).