Underfoot: Cooking with Paprika, a long short film
Faculty Advisor Name
Corinne Diop
Department
School of Art, Design & Art History
Description
Underfoot: Cooking with Paprika is what I call a “long short” video at 19 minutes and 20 seconds in duration. It is edited documentation of a site-specific, durational, improvised performance piece in which I create work on paper with my feet while cooking dinner for my partner and our daughter. I make the marks on the paper using charcoal, graphite, and paprika. The footprints document my movement through a confined space over a few hours. For the video’s duration, shot with two cameras, the viewer only sees feet and legs and the paper on the floor. The audience hears our voices and the diegetic sounds from the kitchen as I prepare the meal. The meal, a traditional Hungarian one, also incorporates paprika, but this remains unknown to the viewers. By setting up a meditative solo piece in our home’s nucleus, I am consciously setting myself up for failure. At two-and-a-half minutes in, my cat walks onto the scene and steps into the charcoal, initiating the derailment. It surprises me how quickly it devolves into chaos from here– a lovely, exuberant, and joyful chaos, that is neither meditative nor solo, as my daughter enters the scene, dipping her feet into the charcoal and dancing all over the paper.
The video is presented in vignettes that depict the development of the evening. In one of the vignettes, my husband asks how much he should intervene in controlling our daughter. I’m not sure how to answer because although I want to maintain artistic control over my work, my daughter is engaging in my work which is as much about my family as it about confinement, stagnated gender roles, and multi-tasking, so it makes sense for her to be in the piece if she wants to be. Yet she is wild and I, as she acknowledges in the video, am “picky.” It ends up coming down to a parenting decision due to the time, so I am saved from having to make the call as an artist. Once my daughter is off preparing for bed, ahead of dinner time because it is so late, I have some time to myself. The video is now in the meditative, contemplative state in which I had initially envisioned it and remains so until my daughter returns with her energy, which, I could easily see when reviewing the footage, is an essential component of this piece.
movie still number 1
Underfoot_CookingWIthPaprikaMovie.mp4.00_03_04_00.Still002.jpg (586 kB)
movie still number 2
Underfoot: Cooking with Paprika, a long short film
Underfoot: Cooking with Paprika is what I call a “long short” video at 19 minutes and 20 seconds in duration. It is edited documentation of a site-specific, durational, improvised performance piece in which I create work on paper with my feet while cooking dinner for my partner and our daughter. I make the marks on the paper using charcoal, graphite, and paprika. The footprints document my movement through a confined space over a few hours. For the video’s duration, shot with two cameras, the viewer only sees feet and legs and the paper on the floor. The audience hears our voices and the diegetic sounds from the kitchen as I prepare the meal. The meal, a traditional Hungarian one, also incorporates paprika, but this remains unknown to the viewers. By setting up a meditative solo piece in our home’s nucleus, I am consciously setting myself up for failure. At two-and-a-half minutes in, my cat walks onto the scene and steps into the charcoal, initiating the derailment. It surprises me how quickly it devolves into chaos from here– a lovely, exuberant, and joyful chaos, that is neither meditative nor solo, as my daughter enters the scene, dipping her feet into the charcoal and dancing all over the paper.
The video is presented in vignettes that depict the development of the evening. In one of the vignettes, my husband asks how much he should intervene in controlling our daughter. I’m not sure how to answer because although I want to maintain artistic control over my work, my daughter is engaging in my work which is as much about my family as it about confinement, stagnated gender roles, and multi-tasking, so it makes sense for her to be in the piece if she wants to be. Yet she is wild and I, as she acknowledges in the video, am “picky.” It ends up coming down to a parenting decision due to the time, so I am saved from having to make the call as an artist. Once my daughter is off preparing for bed, ahead of dinner time because it is so late, I have some time to myself. The video is now in the meditative, contemplative state in which I had initially envisioned it and remains so until my daughter returns with her energy, which, I could easily see when reviewing the footage, is an essential component of this piece.
