Out of Place: The artist residency as a space of creative exploration and reflection
5 and 6 July 2018, University of Plymouth, UK
Between 2013 and 2017, seven artists associated with the University responded to Cyprus through residencies at Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre. The resulting work indicates a range of different responses to the island and to the complex layers of Cypriot culture, a place where historically the Hellenic and the Islamic were variously entangled and, along with legacies of British colonialism, remain marked now. Taking the Nicosia research programme as a focus, the 2018 Summer Symposium hosted by Land/Water and the Visual Arts at University of Plymouth will focus on the notion of residency as a model fostering creative investigation and making as a mode of response to place. Through this case study the symposium invites critical reflection on the pleasures and challenges of working in previously unfamiliar locations. This annual summer symposium will celebrate 25 years of Land/Water and the Visual Arts (and its predecessors) as an active research group.
Joint paper with Stuart Moore
Approaching the zone: filmmaking by osmosis
Abstract
Our presentation concerns a collaborative project-in-progress that began with our joint residency in Nicosia at the end of 2016. As film-makers, we make work separately and have also collaborated for several years on a variety of films. The work is a collaboration, and the presentation today entwines our individual positions and reflections on the project, as we move into the post-production phase of the film-making – we will be completing the editing of Father-land in August, and the film will be premiered at NiMAC in the autumn. The project has evolved partly through the informal discussions we have whilst working together, combined with a growing interest to make a film exploring ideas of home and (dis)placement, which evolves from a shared history of both having a father who was stationed with the Royal Air Force in Cyprus during the Cold War period before the division of the island in 1974, and our experiences of a militarised nomadic childhood, being continually uprooted and ‘relocated’.
Presentation followed by In Conversation: Autobiography, oral history and memory with Kayla Parker, Stuart Moore, and Hannah Drayson, facilitated by Dr Rachel Christofides.