Indvielsen – Invitation to the exhibition opening – June 3 – Copenhagen

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It is my great pleasure to invite you to the opening of the exhibition of our project –

Indvielsen | Initiation: The Danish Tribe

June 3, 2016
17:00 – 19:00, Artist talk at 17.30
Politiken Boghal – Rådhuspladsen 37 , 1785 København K

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This is a multi-disciplinary art project that me and Laureline Demonet have been working on lately. It is a project where we combine social studies, fashion, textile craft and photography.

Laureline explores the views of newcomers to Denmark on the Danish fashion and “Danishness” in general. She then creates a mask of what she has discovered through the interviews and later on I take photographs of the interviewees wearing their “Danish” mask.

This work is an opportunity for the Danes to look at themselves from a very unusual angle. We wish thereby to shake up the stereotypes about national identities and invite you to join the tribe!

The first part of our project will be exhibited as an installation on the Metro’s construction’s wall -City Hall Square. This is definitely the largest installation that I have ever been part of – we take over the whole wall, which is 4 meters high and 50 meters long, from top to bottom! The oversized portraits, accompanied by a narrative, will be there from the 3rd of June 2016 until end of December 2016.

More about the project: https://indvielsen.dk/

I’m really looking forward to seeing you on June 3rd for the opening of this bizarre project!

How to be happy: Don’t compare yourself to others

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Some days are like that – the first thing you want to do is to clean up the space around, to restructure, to create opportunities for new things to happen.

Spending 5-10 minutes for going through some papers that got accumulated over the past few weeks, throwing some things out, putting away some others, creating space for new or more relevant to be in front of you – feels so rewarding!

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I don’t curerntly have an opportunity to set up a permanent table for my creative projects. A friend shared her tips how she does it – she uses a window sill or a small shelf when she is on the go and once more settled, sets up a table. My window sill is currently an extension of my working desk and sudden;y I realized, that actually it doesn’t have to be. Most of my work realted stuff I can bring to another place and actually set up a small creative window sill here.

While cleaning up, I have stumbled upon some interesting previous work. My first attempt at making a cut out poetry from the newspaper headlines, and also my work on vitality from February, when I was rather sick and really needed some strengths to get over a cold. I’ve done it in one of the Creative Rendezvous sessions. We chose a strength that we felt like we really lacking at the moment and tried to picture it while using a non-dominant hand. It was very inspiring – since themovements become more free, since you can’t control the very fine movements that your dominant hand is capable of doing. It felt invigorating and liberating at the same time.

One of my favorite excercises in the Creative Flow as a Resource course is my adaptation of a Life Ring exercise. I believe that it is very beneficial for own mental health and life satisfaction not to compare your place in life to others, but to you, 3 months ago or a year ago. Reflect on how are you actually doing since then? What has changed? What got better? What goe worse? What can you improve? Are your priorities and interests still the same?

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Time perspective across cultures and across time -research projects updates

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These days besides my activities linked to organizing our Network’s next meeting in Copenhagen this August: Celebrating Time, which will run from 15 to 19 August, I’m also working on finalizing two research projects that we started some time ago.

We are still working with Evgeny Osin on figuring out how to make sense out of the data we have from 33 countries using the ZTPI measure. As always with these type of convenience data sets, some things work and some other don’t. But we are making some progress and we hope to finalize the study during our open data lab session during the conference. So if you’re interested in learning how to deal with such data sets, or you have some good advice – you’re more than welcome to drop by. Check out the program of the conference to know when the session will be scheduled.

And as earlier announced in our Network updates – Aleksandra Kostic is editing a new book with current research in time perspective field. Britt Wiberg, me, Grazia Carelli and Marie Wiberg are working on a chapter for that book: Developing empirical profile of the balanced time perspective (BTP) and exploring its stability over time. It has been a very interesting and insightful project involving case studies and a lot of work! Aleksandra has set up a deadline for us – May 25th, so we are doing our best to meet it.

St. Petersburg: what do doping scandal, 3D vision, positive aging and opera have in common?

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My trip to Saint Petersburg was so inspiring in so many ways! It was a great pleasure to revisit the St.Petersburg State University and to reconnect with friends and colleagues there and also make new friends and connections.

It was a very insightful round table organized by Stepan Mednikov about the doping scandal in sports and what psychologists can do about it – there were psychologists working with athletes, a coach, students, who work with athletes and very nice discussions. I really enjoyed the session.

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From the talk by B. Rogers “Issues and non-issues in 3D-vision” I took away that purpose of perception is to detect what the world offers us, it is extraction of meaning that it is designed for. We have not evolved in isolated, but rather complex environment, where everything is present at the same time and is rather mixed up. I enjoyed that he was rather critical to his own work and discussing the challenges of making research in the lab conditions, where we try to isolate the particular phenomenon to study a particular mechanism, but what does it give us in the end? How to put all those separate mechanisms back together? And I believe he stirred some minds by announcing that the representations don’t exist.

There was also an insightful session about the link between the current prices for oil, ruble rate and occupational future of students studying in the oil related specializations, which led me to think that oil is a limited resource and it impacts the environment and climate and why do we still use it actually? Why some countries still choose to not to switch to the alternative and less harmful energy resources? Why do students still make a choice towards these type of occupations?

Besides that I enjoyed the section lead by Olga Strizhitskaya “Positive psychology of aging” where Lika Mikeladze was presenting part of her PhD study.

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Besides the conference itself I immensely enjoyed walking around the streets of St.Petersburg. I have also treated myself to an opera show at Mariinsky theater – The Gambler, based on the novel by Dostoyevsky with the music by Sergey Prokofiev (this year is his 125th birthday, so there was a special program dedicated to that occasion) and directed by Valery Gergiev. It was a great show!

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And for those who understands Russian – here is a photo with all the different ads one can see nearby the wardrobe at the Psychology Department at St.Petersburg State University. A funny story happened to me – I needed to leave earlier one day and it happened to be during one of the technical breaks that the wardrobe had. It took us some time together with some organizers of the conference until we managed to retrieve my coat. But then it became more clear why actually almost no one was leaving their coats there ))

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Overall it was a great trip and I’m looking forward to new collaborative ideas that hopefully would bring me back there on another occasion! And many thanks to Olga, who made it all happen!

 

Urbanism and Creativity: Jane Jacobs

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I believe that lively cities where society can operate in an intense way make meetings out of which very fertile and ingenious decisions can come. But if people are isolated, fragmented, if one income class is set off from other income classes, the meeting simply does not occur. If different kinds of talents don’t come together, if different sorts of ideas don’t rub up against one another, if the necessary money never comes in juxtaposition with the necessary vision, the meeting doesn’t occur.

Happy 100th birthday, Jane Jacobs. via Brain Pickings / Maria Popova

Note to myself: get the book: Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

DIS students: final projects FA15

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Being an immigrant myself, Hamide‘s (Şeyda Özçetin and Seda Özçetin) story is very close to mine as well.. some very similar trials and tribulations… been a ‘proud’ alien in my own home-country for many years, then being pushed out due to economic conditions and been living here and there.. underemployment.. sure! been there, done that.. not only me, my mom as well – educated as a space engineer she currently works as a nanny in London. I’m not being deported though, but I’ve been in a situation when Italian mafia was hunting us… not a boring life for sure )) whatever doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger, or at least I hope so!

I’m happy that this project done by Julian Andrews , Megan Kessler, Kate Puglia, Laura McLaughlin, and Daisy Bowes Williamson as part of our cross-cultural psychology course at DIS is really out there now and hopefully it will bring some changes! Well done, “Jeg Danske!”, well done!

Immigrant, Fabulous and Proud of it

Time Perspective Network – program highlights and other updates

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Celebrating Time – TPCPH2016 Highlights

Some of the highlights of this year’s edition of the Time Perspective conference is its cultural satellite events. We are partnering up with the Danish Film Institute and CPH:PIX and co-organize two movie screenings in Cinemateket.

August 18th, at 16:45 – Into Eternity (2009) with introduction by the film director, Michael Madsen (DK) and follow up debate with futurist Patrick van der Duin (NL), climate and energy expert from Greenpeace Tarjei Haaland (DK), psychologist Yaacov Trope (USA) and an architect Marie-Louise Holst (DK).

August 19th, at 18:30 – The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) feature film with introduction and follow-up Q&A session with prof. Philip Zimbardo (USA).

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100 days of celebrating time

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I’ve joined THE100DAYPROJECT started by Elle Luna:

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As proposed by the rules, I chose my own action – which will be celebrating time as a way to follow up my quest2016 answer to a prompt what would be question of main focus for the year – “What is time?”. And my unique hashtag will be #100daysofcelebratingtime. I though it will be also fun to keep track of all the different projects that I’m working on now.

And here my first 10 days of 100 days of celebrating time. Follow me on Instagram and join the fun with your 100 day project!

Day 1/100 – time to travel, time to observe

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