our concept and plans!

salut laurent and caro!

great news! i wrote to sylvia, introduced her to our project, made a thesis and asked her for support (informativ and financial). she was enthusiastic!
andreas and i werent lazy over the last weeks and i would like to present you our "concept"
please let us know what you think about it, what we could improve, share your thoughts with us.
we have worked on the interview with the journalist andreas worked with on the heimat project they did with this school last year.
she helped us with the structure and questions.
i will present the questions we worked out first and then what we developed for the fotos:

- when visiting the person to be interviewed in their house, introducing the project "heimat" and explaining the term heimat, so not to interupt the flow of conversation when we come to the question about heimat.
these are rules the journalist gave us:

- start of conversation, warming up phase, with concise questions (revering to immediate environment of interviewed person), later : abstract questions (what menas heimat to you? if france was a woman...)
- always ask open questions: - no possibility to answer with no or yes
- no assistence for answers or hints to what the answer might be
- no questions giving a choise : "is it .... or maybe ....?"
- only one question at a time
- meet the interviewpartner on an even level: show and communicate your openness, respect but not shy, sensere interest. very easy if you are, she says - bodylanguage, eyecontact
of course we know that but i can imagine to be so nervous in the strange situation and environment, that it is good to keep in mind

questions:

where are you from? (do your ancetors come from, where are your roots)
how long have you been living in paris for?
how did you get to paris, how did you arrive?
where was your first place of residence/ habitation (in town) ?


how do you feel in your flat/house? (feeling inside and towards the place?)
how do you feel in your area/quater? (is your family living here/ do you have kids in paris?)
Do you feel home here?
what means "chez soi" for you?
what means "heimat" to you ?
(these two questions we put after another on purpose, so that the answerer might make a connection between them themselfes. separatelly many immigrants might answer : "chez soi, thats my house, my quater, where my family lives - heimat, thats my homecountry. " we think that chez soi and heimat are very close terms and maybe the answerer might realize the ambivalence in connecting the two with places so far appart?)

kann you tell us, where your heimat is?
when you were a child, did heimat mean something else for you then it does now? did the expression/meaning chance?

would you sing us a french song? what ever comes to your mind first (alternativelly, if they dont sing - poem, saying ...)
thank you very much! would you now sing a song from your mothercountry?(in case of immigrants) (poem, saying if they picked this)
(we thought it might be great as material for soundcollages. interesting what french songs immigrants pick first - tombe la chemise/marseillaise/la vie en rose???, to record them sing maybe with a foreign accent, hear if their voice, emotion, expression changes when they sing songs from home)

if france was a woman, what would she look like? how do you imagine her?
how would you call her?
what would you say to her?

(any other ideas for questions?)

how do you say "mama" in your motherlanguage?(french too)


fotoconcept:

we create the setting, the visual frame of the pictures:
- place (home of person, chez soi)
- light (inscenated, detactable, not natural)
- display detail ( what you see in the picture, how close (like the frame) (maybe half a meter away, if person sits, we see head, shoulders, chest)
- which backround and how much we see of it, how far away etc. (probably a rather still backround (e.g. wall, tapestry) but clearly recognisable as home of person - maybe part of furniture visible)
- mariannes hat (its got to look good and dignified - dark red, thick, good material , maybe theater/vintage??)
the had will only be an accessoir, maybe only visable on the second look, not in the center of attention)
-way of putting in scene

aim: strong serial character of pictures, not indidual, unconnected portraits

people are free what to do with the hat - put it on, eat it up, step onto it,
put them selfes in scene how they want, how they feel
they choose who they are, how they are, what they look like

in this stage people might not know what to do at first. other then in the interview we could assist them finding ideas.
we should do pix after the interview, so people arent shy and at ease with us being around


interview people:
women of every kind and couleur
- little girls, immigrants, old parisiens, prostituts, schooldirectors, mothers, daughters,
chiniese, arab, indian, african, french, dutch, american?, from the banglieu and the quiet parts of town

thats the idea

now important questions from us to you, please answer them as fast as you can:
how do you like the interview concept, how the fotoconcept? alterations, new ideas?
how do you like the questions, other ideas?
did you develop other ideas reverling the project?
how and where do we get our interview partners - possibilities of getting in contact?
what technic do you have, can you get - light, camera, microphone.
what do we have to bring?
we would like to come for a long weekend from 7. - 9th or 10th december.
it is pretty much the only weekend possible for us in december, and we think its a great date, as its enough time to organize what we need and it leaves us enough time afterwards to work on what comes out of it, which will be the raw material to our actual work.
is that a good time for you?
till that day we should have organized some sponsorship.#
we dont need to take all the pictures and interview at that time - it wouldnt be possible, but some, so we find an common visual and conceptual idea.
can you find 4,5,6 people we could interview and take pics of? maybe for the pix not only mothers ???? we have to think about that again. and talk about it. but in any case they need to have strong faces and interesting personalities so we get strong images.
can you organize mariannes hat? a good one, so that they dont look like sarkozy fans (we saw some wearing them...oioioi)
it would be great if you could make some interviews before we arrive - there will be many things we didnt think of and that will not work as we thought. we could work much more effective if we can learn from your experiences. try to take pictures. it will be very hard to work in a strange house with strangers.
please please you wonderful, answer to all of these questions, we are excitedly waiting for your answers.

i will finnaly scan the ideas we had for putting in scene, so you can imagine whats in our heads.
all our love from germany, lets speak soon!!!
Alex (und andreas!)