About Telling Ideas

The last month of the residency is going to start. It’s time for last thoughts on the projects and to try and refine them. On 5th October UNIDEE in progress will take place: residents will present their projects to the public for the very first time. The atmosphere has changed since August. It is possible to detect a sense of urgency all around the UNIDEE spaces: ideas must take the form of words; words must take the form of objects, installations or performances.

From the point of view of an outside observer, as I consider myself, projects are beginning to take shape: visible, touchable and understandable. I think now it is all about using the most effective communicative tool to project these ideas. Or in other words it is all about making one’s ideas visible, touchable and understandable.

The last workshop organized by UNIDEE was (aptly) about communication. In the words of Nik Dee, who organized and conducted it, the WS was about “capturing an idea and presenting it”, “shaping a story and communicating it.”

This is not just about selling an attractive story to an audience of potential sponsors. The ambition is to filter the idea, to polish it, and to order it. We need in the first place to communicate it to ourselves. The aim of the WS was to supply participants with handy tools to carve from a raw idea the critical facts that are needed to use it properly. The exercise of exposing one’s project in just ten or twenty seconds aims to help us in understanding what is the core of the project or, in other words, what is relevant and what is irrelevant in successfully conveying an idea.