Project Dare to create 365 +

Sisters Barbara Keresztesi and Judith Keresztesi in Budapest, Hungary are making Project Dare to create 365 +. Barbara explains, "We make a mini art or DIY show every day. I use any kind of materials I find around me, food, fabric, recycled materials, paint. I set just one standing rule in the beginning: I must create something original once a week, on the other six days I rethink or remake ideas other artists already figured out. My sister Judit joined my project, she writes an introduction to my daily creation, and she writes a mini-novel weekly."


Why did you Decide to do this project? I decided to start this project, because I was stuck on many levels, but mostly on my creative level. On the 30th of March, we moved in our new apartment, and I felt awesome. The different place created a different mindset, I was full of go, and I didn’t want to lose it. That time my sister was watching the movie Julie and Julia all the time. I had absolutely no idea why she was doing that and she didn’t know it either. After a while she moved further and started searching for more information about Julie Powel and the way she blogged and cooked her way through one year of her life. I wasn’t particularly happy about the idea of committing myself to doing something compulsory every day, but a little later she presented Lawrence Dai Julie/Julia Project and I found the concept witty. She went on looking and eventually came across your site "make something 365, and get unstuck." That was on the 20th of March and we started the program on the 1st of April. I'm a Hungarian gal, I’m blogging in Hungarian. This is my day 109.



How has doing a yearlong / daily project Affected Your Life? I am not even halfway done yet, but I think I wouldn’t recognize the person I was a hundred days ago. Immanuel Kant said: "Happiness is like palaces in fairy tales those whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it." In the past three months I became a conqueror I think.  I always thought I had detailed plans I just somehow couldn’t accomplish them due to circumstances beyond my control.  The 365 day experiment taught me that I didn’t know anything about time. I had no idea that in one day there were only 24 hours. In my professional life I work with digital information, but I always knew I had something to do with three dimensional art, and so I was piling up thing like paint, empty bottles, old newspapers, canvas, fabric, buttons etc. and stored them in endless rows of boxes for years. Without this program I wouldn’t have been able to learn how actually I can create something real.
I work with my sister Judit. We were always close, we thought working together would be easy. But we didn’t know that the kind of physical and social nearness this project required could have turned out to be a disaster. It hasn’t so far. We fought a lot during the first 40 days, mostly because I was too impulsive and she was too controlling. Finally I admitted I needed to have a closer look at project management charts, and Gantt-diagrams, had to learn how to make a plan properly.  At the same time she accepted, she couldn’t possibly control everything and probably sometimes we survived a situation despite the fact she kept everything under control. So we started negotiating, became much more emphatic, honest and polite to each other. We’ve developed a sound cooperation system for our daily mini-show . Around the 50th day, my brother-in-law Fis joined the game too. Now there are three of us playing, and we call ourselves the production team. I do not know what is waiting for us at the end of the Dare to create 365 + project, but I must say, it is beginning to look a lot like the best thing ever happened to me so far.





See all of their creations HERE (in Hungarian) and HERE (Calendar with English Titles)



1 comment:

mim said...

What a terrific interview. I love what they said about being different after 100 days. I wish I read Hungarian!