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Surrealism is a movement from the early 20th century that became proeminent specially in literature and visual arts. It has a lot to do with the subconscious mind, and the most famous artworks that are put under the Surrealist umbrella usually depict illogical happenings that take place in disturbing dream-like worlds. In his Surrealist manifest, André Breton claimed that the movement aims to "resolve the previously contraditory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality". The movement and the techniques developed under it both still influence many artistic pieces to this day, be it in movies, books, paintings or many other forms of art.

I believe that by studying Surrealist theorists deeper and analysing Surrealist artworks I will better understand the ways in which the dream-reality boundaries were explored and destroyed in art, which may help me a lot to create a concept for this projet.

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Inside Out ia an animation movie created by Disney-Pixar which depitcs a short period of time in the life of a girl by showing the interactions of her emotions (portrayed by five main characters, Fear, Disgust, Joy, Sadness and Anger) inside her mind.
There are two scenes in it that might relate to what I aim to achieve in this project: the scene where dreams are made and the scene that depicts the subconcious mind of the girl.

The frst scene shows dreams being made in a room that resembles a movie set, where the little creatures that work inside people's minds enact scenes wearing simple costumes and using simple effects that translate to things that look realistic in the final dream (in example, characters in a dog suit are seen as a real dog in the final dream, and throwing teeth in front of the camera translates as the girl dreaming her teeth are actually falling of). I like that scene for two main reasons: the idea of dreams being represented by simple, improvised, maybe even handmade objects (which is something I want to use in my work) and also the thought of dreams as little movies pourposelly made by our minds, which may not be actually accurate but is a very interesting concept in a fantasy setting.

The second scene I mentioned shows the subconcious mind of the character as a dark, eerie-looking place in which things can fall and are not able to get out from. It reminds me of a junkyard, and I liked both the unsettling feeling it produces and the concept of memories that are forgotten but are still there, hidden in a place like that, maybe even indirectly affecting other thigs that go own in our minds.

Inside Out. (2015). [film] Directed by P. Docter and R. Del Carmen. United States: Disney Pixar.

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Insaniy is a song by the american new-wave band Oingo Boingo. It's lyrics speak mainly about mental illness, religion and mind-controlling media, but the two reasons I am writing about it here im my research are the fantastical, almost non-sensical imagery it employs and the overall unsettling vibe created by the intruments and the parts sung in childrens' voices.
Considering only those two aspects, this song makes me feel in a way I cannot seem to acurrately describe, but I want my work to have the same sort of feeling - unsettling, nonsensical, half-asleep, unnerving are some words I could use to try to describe it.

Elfman, D. (1994). Insanity. Giant Records.

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Much like "Insanity", I am the Warlus is a song that employs lots of non-sensical imagery, but taking it one step further. The entire song is composed via the descripition of weird, nonsensical, impossible scenes, and what I like about it is that despite the melody being much more "happy" than in "Insanity", the images created still have a twisted side to them that create on me a feeling of unrest (like "why do I feel unsettled if the melody is so catchy?", a feeling like you want to somehow "leave" the song but cannot). This is also a feeling I might want to explore in my work if I don't go for the feeling I described in the entry for "Insanity" - instead of being downright insane and creepy, maybe being unsettling in a more subtle way, in which on a first look things may not seem that creepy but when you start to think about them they might get so. Taking as an example one of the pieces I am making, which is a dollhouse with a mouth and tongues - you can find it kinda cute, but it gets a lot weirder if you start to think how might be the insides of it (does the person who lives there lives in a normal room or in a room made out of house stomach?), and also one piece that consist in candles with human ears poking out of them (are the ears made out o candle wax or is the candle made out of flesh? - or, a little more disgustingly, are the ears made out of candlewax or is the candle made out of earwax?).

Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. (1967). I am the Warlus. Parlophone.

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Ugly doll is a brand of plush toys that depicts weird looking little creatures in bright colours. What I aim to take from it to apply to my work is their simplicity - how they are able to achieve a slightly creepy (but still cute) look with only simple shapes and very little detail.

UglyDolls Factory. (2019). Check out the UglyDolls Factory!. [online] Available at: https://uglydollsfactory.com/ [Accessed 28 May 2019].

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Aracuam is a brazilian line of monstruous toy art plushies that has a very unique aesthetic. All of its toys have a certain unsettling feel to them, but at the same time are adorably quisky in their own way. That is a quality I want to achieve in the plushies I will make for this project, and one thing that the Aracuam monsters made me think of is using human-like sculpted teeth to make my monsters creepier, since the combination of human-like bodyparts and weird, fantastical creatures might produce the unsettling effect I want to achieve.

Instagram.com. (2019). Aracuam (@aracuam) • Instagram photos and videos. [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/aracuam/ [Accessed 28 May 2019].

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Sucker Punch is a movie that follows the daydreams of a group of girls that live in a strict, power-abusing mental health facility which they try to escape. It may not me a great movie, but the way it jumps from scenes from reality to scenes from the girls' daydreams is something that really caught my attention. Although the movie relies deeply in fantastic, cgi-created worlds filled with action to get its point across - which is definitely not what I aim to achieve in my project, since I want to create a more simple, calming but unsettling atmosphere, one thing that I can take from it is the grim feeling it creates when depicting reallity in face of the girls' dreams.

Sucker Punch. (2011). [film] Directed by Z. Snyderq. United States: Warner Bros.

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Persona is a series of rpg based videogames in which you have to clear dungeons by fighting monstruous creatures, as well as control the life of your character trhough everyday actions like attending school or goig grocery shopping.

In Persona 4, specifically, the dungeons are part of a dream-like world that can be acessed through television screens, and that are on themselves buildings that represent the subconcious desires and fears of each of the characters. What I would like to take from this game is the eerie atmosphere it is able to create in each dungeon, which has its own design (shape of the floors and rooms, position of the rooms, furniture) and its own monstruous creatures that all relate to the character that dungeon represents. I think that this game can be a valuabe reference for me in terms of creating an atmosphere both by designing a room and by designing creatures that inhabit that room.

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Persona is a series of rpg based videogames in which you have to clear dungeons by fighting monstruous creatures, as well as control the life of your character trhough everyday actions like attending school or goig grocery shopping.

In Persona 4, specifically, the dungeons are part of a dream-like world that can be acessed through television screens, and that are on themselves buildings that represent the subconcious desires and fears of each of the characters. What I would like to take from this game is the eerie atmosphere it is able to create in each dungeon, which has its own design (shape of the floors and rooms, position of the rooms, furniture) and its own monstruous creatures that all relate to the character that dungeon represents. I think that this game can be a valuabe reference for me in terms of creating an atmosphere both by designing a room and by designing creatures that inhabit that room.

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This is a secret facebook group dedicated to selling and trading unusual, unsettling objects. By the rules of the group I am not supposed to disclose what is posted in there, but I decided to include it on my research anyway because the generl feeling of the objects that are sold there greatly informed my work.

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Was an English fiction author that passed away a few years ago. His books are all set in deeply complex fantasy worlds he creates, one of them being the Discworld - a world that consists in a plane circle that is carried by space elephants that are carried by a giang space turtle that calmly navigates the space without being aware of the chaos created by human societies that live on the disc.
To keep this entry short ( I could talk for hours about each of his books), the main thing that I think I can take from Pretchett's books is the atmosphere he creates in his stories, which are heavily based in the everyday absurdities of mankind, almost nonsensical imagery, complete disregard about the laws of nature, and mainly the art of describing things that may be unsettling and even horrible, but in a way that doesn't take itself seriously at all and is so casual that makes things seem almost normal.

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Neil Gaiman - Fragile things 1 and 2, Coraline, Sandman (I'm grouping these 3 entries for the sake of organization)

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Neil Gaiman - Fragile things 1 and 2, Coraline, Sandman (I'm grouping these 3 entries for the sake of organization)

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- Fragile things is a collection of short fictional stories that, although they do not share a same unique plot, do share the same overall unsettling, disturbing vibe. All the stories use either very dark imagery or explore dark sides of human existence, or, in most cases, both; the eerie way in which those are described creates a dream-like, surrealistic world that is particular to each story, but leave me with the feeling that they are not actually /confined/ (sorry, I don't know how to write in italic here) to each story - I mean, that they are wll constructed enough to cary lots of other stories inside them, but the one that Gaiman wrote is just one of them. This feeling of a world that can be a lot bigger than what we are seeing, but we can see only pieces of stories and not the full stories is a feeling that I want my installation to have.

Gaiman, N. (2009). Selections from Fragile things. New York: HarperCollins.
Gaiman, N. (2014). Selections from fragile things, volume two. New York: Morrow.

- Coraline is one of Gaiman's 4 books aimed mainly at children. As in other Gaiman's books, it explores a lot the dark and the macabre, but this time in a subtle (not the right word, most of Gaiman's stories are subtle, but I cannot find the righ word to descrbe this) and child-like way. This contradiction - the dar and the cute, the horrific and the happy - is something I would like to explore in my work as well.

Gaiman, N., McKean, D. and Gulik, H. (2014). Coraline. [London]: Bloomsbury Childrens.

- Sandman is a series of graphic novels that depicts the life of the being that rules over the world of dreams, and how it interacts with the universe and the other beings that live in it. The plot in itself has a lot to do with my project, but I'm chosing to write about the visual aspects of the series. The design of the characters is somewhat simple, but at the same time rich in it's simplicity; and the way the scenes are drawn (high contrast, lighting coming from unusual directions, bold lines) greatly contributes to creating the eerie, fantastical atmosphere of the story.

Gaiman, N., Kieth, S., Dringenberg, M. and Jones, M. (2010). The sandman. New York: DC Comics.

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Latex is a material that I had used very few times before, and only to cast dolls I had made a mold of. In this project I learned that using latex with a paintbrush (as you would use a thick paint), covering felt with it and also letting it dry in a flat surface and stretching it when it dries out are ways to obtain different results that were very helpful when making my objects.

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A 3d pen is a tool that works like a hot glue gun, but instead of glue it melts the same thin strips of plastic that are used in 3d printers.
When I take notes of my dreams in the morning I always make little sketches that are very scribbled and not very defined, and that is something I was struggling to translate into my work until I found out about 3d pens.
The tool itself is not very expensive and it allows people to "scribble in 3d", which helped a lot to create the feeling I was aiming for in some of my objects.

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This is an exhibition I visited in FIESP (Avenida Paulista) about the life and work of José Leonilson, a brazilian artist that worked a lot with the concept of afective memories and fictional, dream-like stories - which has a lot to do with my work.

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I attended a stencil workshop to learn ways to add texture to my exhibition space walls. I ended up choosing not to work with stencils and work with screen-printed "posters" instead, but the techniques I learned might be useful in the future.