The A one day project (here on aodp) was a project that ran for four years (2011-2015). Its intention was to question what is a project? What do we consider a project to be? What are the technical, theoretical, and practical requirements for something to be a project? Does something being a project depend on the seriousness of the endeavour? In overcoming adversity? To address these questions, on the 26th of May 2011, a friend and colleague, Mayra Morales, and I started using a website we set up for this specific purpose that followed the intention of doing one project every-single-day. We decided to make a website because, although we wanted to work together on these questions, we weren’t living in the same city at the time, so it would have to be online. In the long run this ended up transforming into a digital archive of the project (each one labelling our posts in the website). The format or medium, the topic, intention, duration, or implementation were irrelevant. There was no requisite on addressing the questions other than doing a project every day and uploading it to a public site.

Both of our first projects were photographs of something we did. I positioned myself between two mattresses and called it Takeout paninni; and Mayra superimposed a photo of her mouth on the phone on top of her actual mouth and calling it Picture over picture over face. And so, it began.

This project continued for four years, accompanying me through all the places I went on to live and visit. It followed me all the way to my two years completing my master’s degree in Finland. During the four years of the project, there were thousands of questions, many of them by others. Those questions would often take the form of a more inquisitive interrogation rather than a (non)articulated dialogue between two (or more) people. I wish I had noted down all the questions I was asked, but I didn’t (many of the questions did contained a “why?”, “why are you doing this?” “why this way?” “why, why, why?”). Although I didn’t save all those questions, after four years, after all the projects realized, the mediums used, and the people involved (by participation or observation), there was one question that never left me, “What are these? What are these things in this archive?”.
These questions were not directly tied to the initial inquiry that sparked the project, “what is considered a project?” instead, they served as an invitation to do something without the necessity for defining or labelling them. These aspects became apparent to me over the course of the four years engaging with the daily doings, yet I believed I had not actively pursued them until I gained the opportunity to step back from the actions and contemplate them. A resistance to labelling the “things” done as part of the aodp. A resistance to constricting it into a definition of the practice. To have the possibility to just do, as Sol LeWitt would invite Eva Hesse, to,

“stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.“
(Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, 14 April, 1964)

Or as Allan Kaprow writes in his article “Just Doing”, where he shares a series of seemingly unrelated doings such as trading dirt from his garden that he would then trade for someone else’s dirt. He does this regularly for some time until one day, this doing invited an exchange of understandings, “I asked the woman there,

“Can I have a bucket of your dirt? I’ll give you one in return.” She stared at me. “You want a bucket of dirt? From here? Why?” She pointed to the barren clay of the roadside. She thought she hadn’t heard me right. I said, “It’s heavy-duty Buddhist dirt,” (this referring to the dirt he got from the Zen Center at some point) and I told her the story. She was clearly impressed with the Buddhist part. “I thought you were an artist.” I said to her yes and that this was what I did. “I thought you were a college professor.” “Sure. I teach this sort of thing, trading dirt.” “They pay you for it?” she asked me. Then she thought a moment. “But it’s not serious; it’s what my grandson does.” She gestured toward the child playing on the floor with cornhusks. “What’s serious?” I said to her. So, we had a long talk about the meaning of life while I dug a hole at the side of the road. As I was about to pour the Buddhist dirt into it, she tossed some dry seeds into the bucket. I said, “What did you do that for?” “Why not? It can’t hurt,” she said. (The dirt trading and the stories went on for three years. It had no real be-ginning or end. The stories began to add up to a very long story, and with each retelling they changed. When I stopped being interested in the process [it coincided with my wife and I having to move after our rental property was sold], I put the last bucket of dirt back into the garden.).”
(Kaprow, Allan. “Just Doing.” TDR (1988–), vol. 41, no. 3, 1997, pp. 106.)

Just as some of the doings included in this article and Kaprow’s chapter Just Doing from his book Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life can raise questions such as “What’s the point?” or “Why” or “Is that art?” or “They pay you for it?” many of the projects in the aodp may be seen as unconventional approaches to various subjects. But doing those approaches is a dimension of doing research. At first, the approaches might be elusive, unclear, or seemingly unfounded. After some time, after thinking about the process, dwelling on the thought they are approaching, after perhaps doing it again and seeing what happens, or doing again modifying some element that composes the doing, then one is engaging with experimentation. Doing, experimenting, observing, elaborating on those things, and proposing what those things are perhaps showing or bringing forward. That is doing research.

After four years of doing the aodp, just about the time I was trying to figure out the topic for my MA thesis, something came to light about the project. It was something that I began to notice around 2014 (a year before beginning the MA thesis) but which I had let slip from my mind while doing. When doing a project every day, one after the other, I was confronted with the question of what to do that day. And if what I was doing was valid. In the beginning, the validity of the doing was attached to the project’s premise in terms of just doing, but after a couple of years, that premise began to move from a statement to a question. From this is doing to: is this doing? And what is this doing?

Those questions dwelt on the backburner of my mind until one day (maybe at the beginning of the fourth year of the project in 2015), I realized that some days the projects were not about the projects themselves but about fulfilling a demand, “I have to do a project”. Doing something for the sake of not letting the day pass without a project. I realized that the online platform had become a box in itself, something where I could fit things done rather than have those things/doings be something by themselves. The aodp had become an excuse, rather than the free roaming of the practice of doing. And it was then that I decided to end it.

I then decided to expand on a phenomenon that had been present for the four years of the project. Present yet not fully aware of. After realizing that I had created a box for these things happening, a place, I wondered why I made a box; wasn’t there already one where I could place the things I did? In my perspective, there wasn’t. Aren’t those doing something? How can I call those doings, those things happening?

In the case of Allan Kaprow, the relationship between just doing, his happening and life are tied down with the phenomenon of experience since Kaprow “embraced the conventions of everyday life – brushing teeth, getting on a bus, dressing in front of a mirror, telephoning a friend – each with its own formal, if provisional, integrity. Ultimately, Kaprow’s notion of ‘forms’ is that they are mental imprints projected upon the world as metaphors of our mentality, not as universal ideals. Templates for modern experience, they are situational, operational, structural, subject to feedback, and open to learning.” (Kelly, Jeff, 1992, p. XVII).

This notion of form and experience as a medium is the point of contact where the aodp finds its propulsion for doing. In the case of Kaprow, his doings would find a place in the art event, in the happenings. But what happens with all those things that don’t belong to the event? To the uncanny, the futile, the quixotic, that which is disregarded as unremarkable, uneventful, unimportant but which, as a failure, contains a field for research.


Quixotic: foolishly impractical,
especially in the pursuit of ideals
(Merriam Webster dictionary).

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