08.11.18 – 19.11.2019
Some of the most recognizable and undeniable identification marks of the current era of globalization are the increased mobility – the relentless way people, goods and cultures transit, wander and travel around – and the fast flow of exchanges, experiences and contact between people and places. A persistent and inexorable vortex of territories, corners, images, memories, voices and words compose our non-linear contemporary traces through life. Notions of belonging, home, distance and proximity are radically shifting, paving the way to processes of transculturation and translocalization.
What does it mean to feel at home? How can we cultivate a sense of place while being mobile? How can we inhabit a permanent transitional state between belonging and adaptation?
The work and research project developed by Claire Rosslyn Wilson – poet, researcher and artist living between Melbourne and Barcelona – address and reflect upon these concepts and questions. With a personal and intimate approach, the artist composes a poetic and visual landscape made by keywords, verses, images and materials that remind her of the constant flux of residency between Melbourne and Barcelona. The project traces a journey of go and return, arrivals and departures, where the different layers of feeling simultaneously coexist here and there.
As Nikos Papastergiadis stated: “Contemporary art practices are increasingly defined by the dual desire for mobility and attachment to place”*.
This exhibition – Residence: Melbourne-Barcelona – contributes to the exploration of the intricate “suspended connections” that constitute the contemporary relations between people and places, revealing the apparently contradictory duality between mobility and attachment.
* Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics, Art, Place, and the Everyday, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2010. Page 8.
Biography
Claire Rosslyn Wilson (Australia) is a freelance cultural writer, researcher and poet, with particular interests in cultural diversity, experiences of place and creative expression for social change. She has international experience working in the arts and resource development in Thailand, Singa- pore, Spain and Australia. She co-wrote Freelancing in the Creative Industries (Oxford University Press, 2015), and is the poetry editor for the human rights journal Right Now. Claire is a PhD can- didate in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, Australia, and is a co-edi- tor of the academic journal Coolabah, of the Transnational and Australian Studies Centre in the University of Barcelona. She has also presented her creative work at a number of writer’s festivals and in 2014 she undertook a creative writing fellowship at the Wheeler Centre Melbourne. Her poems and articles have been published in journals such as the Australian Poetry, Transnational Literature, Art Radar, Culture360, Failed Haiku and others.