Busy, Like Beaver

Yesterday morning I received an email from my contact at the Biennale that I should come right over because tomorrow they will be busy unpacking 1000 works to be installed over the next few days.  It was sink or swim time!  I grabbed my map that Ji-young drew up and made my way to the bus stop - something that was surprisingly complicated because I realized that, for me, the result of jet lag is to lose my ability to retain any new information so that I could barely recognize the streets that we had walked only two days before.  After a bit of confused wandering, I asked a young man who was very helpful and with his additional directions, suddenly everything came back to me.  Now, I am not one to turn my nose up at a bit of confused wandering, but suddenly I had a purpose, a direction, a place to be.

And so I went.

This is Duksoon Chung, who has been my email contact for these many months.  It felt like greeting an old friend.  She did not get to eat bibimbap and see Planet of the Apes yesterday.  She was working.  Hard.  She is here holding one of 300 squares she collected from local residents.  Yes, it is true - they made about 400 squares in a very, very short amount of time (another 100 are coming, perhaps today).  I have now touched most of them and they are real.

We sorted the squares into piles based very generally on color.  The squares shipped from New York have not yet arrived, although I am hoping they do soon because the boxes also contain yarn with which I could be making more squares.  Also yarn that I don't really want to ship back to New York.

Our goal this morning is to visit The Avenue of Trees with the director of the textiles component and make some decisions about the installation.  It appears that I will be installing this all by my lonesome....which should be interesting.  I knew I should have brought along Finn and Lucy!