International Artist Residency/ based in Argentina
Erin La Bonte-Natasha Johl/ Este Aire No Está a la Venta/ Septiembre en RC
THIS AIR is NOT for SALE
I have spent my time in Argentina considering the weight of things, the weight of myself in time and space through new materials. Away from my routine way of life, and my routine way of working, I have aimed at creating a sentiment through objects and photography.
Disconnection has become a strong element in my work. This idea of ideas and the physicality of ideas, that art has become for me a connection in itself.
Erin----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My time at Residencia Corazón in La Plata represents the first stage of a much bigger trip and a wider personal experience for me. I have come to South America for one year to experience different cultures and to encounter new creative challenges, far away from my home.
With this is mind, this is the first step of a very long physical and psychological journey and this automatically fills me with the sense of being woven into a very small piece of a much larger and ever changing tapestry. In turn, this fills me with new emotions, seductions and ideas.
I arrived in Argentina with various ideas for my residential Project most of which revolved around nature and relationships with nature. This was partially due to my time in Bolivia seven years ago which encouraged a strong interest in the thought of ‘Pacha Mama’ (Mother Earth) and beliefs surrounding the concept of Pacha Mama. Similar belief systems are also held in certain parts of the UK as well, particularly in the Western rural parts of the UK, such as Cornwall. I continually find myself drawn to these places in order to feel content. Therefore I felt strongly about including a natural dimension to my work here.
Another influence on my work was ‘Chronicle of a death foretold’, the last book I read before leaving the UK. From this book I took a quote:
‘A poor woman devoted to the cult of her defects’
This quote became my mental springboard for looking at the relationship between womankind and nature. Asking myself the question ‘As women, have we become far removed from Mother Earth and perhaps our natural instincts?’ As a rule, we associate natural destruction and disaffection with masculinity, however, when looking at the female obsession with materialism and fashion, I also wonder ‘Do these obsessions now feed into our abstraction and removal from nature, potentially removing part of the female ‘Raison d’être’?
From these questions I developed a series of photographs revolving around modern female motivation and abstraction of natural forms.
THIS AIR is not for sale, but unfortunately today THIS EARTH is.
Natasha
Ashley Lauren Saks/Los años no vienen solos/agosto en RC
I drive around in circles. I lose my keys. I write things down. I live by my appointment book. I forget where my car is parked. I can’t spell. I think about all the missing information.
I have a desire to remember things from my past which are slowly fading.
I recreate memories. I film the recreations.My practice incorporates video as a tool to access and preserve memories. It is a process based investigation of the psychology behind remembering; an exploration in the notion of “truth”. Since subconscious idealization of memories is inherent, fantasy worlds evolve, forming hybrid embellishments that are a mix of myth and reality. I attempt to contact people from my recent or distant past to recreate fading memories; to fill in the gaps. In doing so, each memory I examine, through recreation and reinterpretation, transforms into a new experience to be archived… the creation of a new memory. As the videos repeat randomly, viewers experience them in a haphazard fashion akin to déjà vu. They become mnemonic devices for me, while imprinting images into the viewer’s minds and potentially triggering latent memories.
I first visited Argentina just over three years ago, and while I remember some moments as if they occurred yesterday, others exist solely through photographs or anecdotes. The impetus for this residency was simple; return to Argentina and recreate moments from my trip. What was not so simple was the process involved in doing so, as many of the recreations entailed working with other people. The collaborative and improvisational elements of these projects, as well as practical issues such as difference in language and culture, presented an array of complications. Conversely, it is these very complications that lend weight to my projects; the process becomes, after all, the seed of a new memory. While the ephemeral nature of memory provides a subject matter for my work, it is the physical, tangible process of recreating that truly inspires and motivates my practice.
“Throughout our life, we reorganize our memories and ideas of the past, conserving more or less the same material, but adding other elements capable of changing its significance and, above all, changing our viewpoint.” –Jean Piaget [from Memory and Intelligence, 1973]
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