'The best thing I ever made was a mess.'

I'm not sure whether what I want to do now will work. Thinking along the lines of invasion and occupation of (everyday) spaces, I wanted to do something that'd be sort of invasive, but more anonymous than the Moniaive work has been.

So, I want to write to whoever it is that's living in my room next year, and ask them to send photos of what it looks like with all of their things in it. The potential difficulty here is that I'm really not sure whether they'd bother to reply. Or that they'd find it a bit weird... The same problems then, that I was worried about when I wrote to Cloch-na-ben. There's a similarity in the method with the letter writing too; using the only information I have to get access to images, which is the postal address - information about the place but not the person. In theory, I'd do this every year, until I had a series of images, collecting history in real-time. Eventually, I'd end up with a sort of tribute to the room, I can imagine feeling like a guardian of sorts. Having the knowledge of what a person's room looks like, which can be quite revealing, but then knowing nothing more about them, I hope might be illustrative of the way we effect the spaces we exist in, and the significance of places in our histories... The way we are able to alter them, and the way we choose to remember them. The sentiment here perhaps goes back the the Proust quote about the way places from memory 'rose up like the scenery of a theatre' and my own conscious efforts to remember the way my grandparents had their house, knowing that the next people to live in it would inhabit the same space, but differently.

('The best thing I've ever made was a mess' sort of refers to a fondness for the mess in my room, and how the way I've managed to make it feel like mine feels, in a way at least, like a greater work than any of the work I've produced for my actual course. I'm much more prolific in making a mess than I am in making art, admittedly. In relation to this project, I like the way it suggests that each place I've affected in some way is part of a series of works, raising something that I've done so many times I couldn't possibly remember each individual instance, to the status of something worthy of remembering. Thus, getting hold of images of other people's 'works' in the the room would be like becoming an art collector.)

I'll give it a go, at least.