Reflection and Evaluation
Negotiated Project: The Bird Who Came From Afar
Alexander Papanikolaou
This project has been one of the clearest turning points in my development as a creative practitioner. The Bird Who Came From Afar began as a personal metaphor but gradually became a structured body of interdisciplinary work that helped me articulate complex feelings around displacement, identity, and emotional survival. In this reflection, I evaluate how the project developed, what influenced my decisions, and how the work has shaped my understanding of my practice.
At the start of the unit, my intention was to explore the emotional landscape of living between places. The bird metaphor arrived naturally: a creature always in motion, never fully settled, carrying memories across distances. The YouTube narration became the central spine of the project. It combined spoken word, atmospheric sound, and image, and this multimodal form felt appropriate for a story shaped by movement and transition. My key aim became to create a piece that did not simply describe displacement but allowed the viewer to feel it.
One of the most significant decisions I made early in the project was to keep the Gringlish poems separate. Although they reflect another aspect of my creative identity, they belong to a different investigation into hybrid language. My tutor correctly noted that combining them risked confusing the conceptual clarity of the Negotiated Project. The bird story is not written in a hybrid tongue; instead, it uses simple, lyrical English to convey emotional truth. Keeping these two strands distinct helped me maintain a tighter focus and a clearer narrative structure.
Throughout the project, I drew closely on theoretical ideas that helped shape my practical choices. Bhabha’s concept of the “in-between” space (1994) offered an intellectual grounding for the emotional tension that the bird embodies. The bird is never fully here or there; this informed my decision to use visual transitions that fade, drift, or blur, suggesting that movement is continuous rather than linear. Similarly, reading Matalas on Cavafy and exile (2015) helped me understand the emotional texture of longing not as weakness but as a creative force. This influenced my tone of narration: quiet, reflective, without dramatic embellishment.
A particularly influential practical reference was the work of contemporary artists who use image and sound to explore migration and emotional fragmentation. For example, the subtle pacing and minimalism found in the video works of Bill Viola inspired me to embrace silence and slowness. Rather than filling every moment with language, I allowed pauses in the narration to become spaces of reflection. This was a direct response to my tutor’s encouragement earlier in the unit to let the work “breathe” and trust the viewer.
The process of creating the visuals for the story was equally revealing. I experimented with collage, layered landscapes, and symbolic imagery, but I found that the strongest moments came from simplicity. A single bird, a distant horizon, or a dimly lit sea carried far more emotional weight than overloaded visual compositions. This realisation marked a shift in my approach: I moved from trying to show everything to trusting implication and restraint. The final visuals reflect this pared-back aesthetic.
Of course, not everything in the process was straightforward. One of the challenges was resisting the temptation to include too many autobiographical details. Although the work is deeply rooted in my personal history, I wanted the story to remain open enough for viewers to project their own meanings. Another challenge was technical: balancing sound levels, finding the right pacing for the narration, and creating images that supported the text without dominating it. These difficulties pushed me to develop stronger editing skills and a more disciplined sense of composition.
Looking back, one of my key learnings is that interdisciplinary work requires clarity of intention. Every medium—voice, image, text, pacing—must serve the same emotional and conceptual purpose. The clearer that purpose becomes, the more coherent the work feels. I learned to ask myself continually: What does this element add? Why is it necessary? This level of self-questioning strengthened both the project and my confidence as an artist.
In conclusion, The Bird Who Came From Afar has allowed me to reclaim and redefine my creative voice. It taught me to trust metaphor, to value simplicity, and to understand my experiences not just as personal memories but as material for poetic transformation. It helped me see the potential of interdisciplinary practice and gave me a clearer direction for the future. The bird may still be flying, but it flies now with intention, clarity, and purpose.
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