'Aerials', Chiara van den Hoven (GSA)
Tunnel Wall, Glen Coe (Scottish Highlands)
October 2020,
Digital images.
I'm thinking about displacement, distance and vision, experienced geology, journeying ... .
The work consists of two images of myself rock climbing in Glen Coe, juxtaposed spontaneously with a 'V' of geese which passed overhead that afternoon. It's a small thought about how the practice of rock climbing might make a 'territory' of the sky, and an attempt to capture different – but coinciding – aerial journeys.
Where do I belong? – on BELONGING
For the children of communism, like myself, there was no such thing as the national identity of Serbians, Croatians or Muslims. We were Yugoslavians.
I remember the first day of school, 1986 a small girl with a pioneer hat. Even though Tito died, the ideal still existed for the next ten years. The children wore those hats and red scarves around their necks. We were so proud of these symbols of our belonging. I remember standing among other students with the Yugoslav flag waving in the wind above our heads as we were being welcomed to our school days.
I was too young to define it as such, but if I ever felt the sense of belonging it was on this day.
Wearing a red scarf and blue pioneer hat meant pride. It meant that we, the young people of Yugoslavia, give our pledge to the values of our country and it was also a promise of our future loyalty to Tito and the communist party. Above all, it meant being integrated in the community, feeling as if this political belonging was our purpose, as something that defines us as valuable members of the society, something heart-warming. Perhaps this notion that is hard to explain to me, from this perspective, was a merger of patriotism on one hand and belonging on the other. For me, communism was deeply integrated in my childhood, and as such it was as important as my family. When other young children learn how to write, some of their first written words are most probably Mum or Dad, but for me those words were:” Long live Yugoslavia”, as shown in the old postcard I found on my family house attic, after my father passed away.
This sense of belonging was deeply integrated in the cores of our beings and the best signifier of this is 1986 “Bukvar”- the first book of every child who starts school. It is a book in which first letters are written, the one in which 7-year olds learnt how to write, of course two alphabets- Cyrillic first, in my case (territory of today’s Serbia) and then Latin, at the age of 8. Among other reminders of my childhood, this book was safely stored on the attic of my family house, for me to find it in 2020. The second page shows a photo of Tito, surrounded by his pioneers and members of Yugoslav youth and the photo is named; “Tito and pioneers” This was long before we would learn that there is something called ethnic diversity, but on the other hand, my family attic hid anther side of reality, obvious in the 1978 Western newspapers that my father was subscribed to. These I found among the other old books and magazines and the question they posed in 1978 was: “After Tito, What?” I guess they knew things that we were not aware of, but I am sure that my father knew too, informed by the propaganda other than that of the Yugoslav prevailing narrative. To his best, however, he kept quiet and we never spoke of it. The irony is that in 1986, I still learnt letters from a book with Tito’s photograph, some 6 years after his death. That is how strong this collective spirit was in us, Yugoslavs - the ghost of the dead president, overshadowing us and our existence.
Photos:
Tito’s pioneers, during a school play, around 1984, with my mother at the back as a teacher, “Ivo Lola Ribar” elementary school, Ruma.
Old postcard with the writing:” Long live Yugoslavia”, some of my childhood drawings and a 1976 magazine about Tito and Italy’s Berlinguer.
“Bukvar”, 1986 with the photo of Tito, the ghost president.
Newsweek, “After Tito, What?”, 1978
Tito today, the relief of Tito, behind the old clock and old football boots, Old Market, Skoplje, 2020.
Simón Bolivar Bridge - Between my studio and the hallway. (2018)
Francisco Llinas Casas
The 300-meter walk in the liminal space that witnesses a displacing shift. The asphalt isthmus that stretches from nationhood to landlessness and delimitates nationalism and crisis. A 7-meter wide street that contains my thousands of compatriots that cross over to join me in diaspora. A printed acetate sheet on the floor, the door wide open between my studio and the hallway, and this being art in Britain.
a cicada, its legs
twitching
silent
in the jaws of a grey-white cat
who calls to her young
through clenched teeth
Why my poem from Girne/Kyrenia (2016) has come back to my mind over the three-month period spent working on this on-line Nomadic Dialogue with fellow artists, I’m not really sure. But, it did, and frequently so. The cat, I’m sure, would not know either. Nor, would the poor cicada; out of luck and trapped. There may be something of a sideways reflection here on the process of gathering, of trapping ideas, and of transferring knowledge, albeit, in a somewhat brutal way. Food – for thought – a gift, but at what price? Yet, it is also a ‘natural’, and inevitable process of exchange and learning.
Over the time that these pages have evolved (been in flux), another thought has grown: that of the Dérive (the drift), which this wandering series of images and text fragments – wrestled from the world of phenomena, passage and the imagination – seem to suggest. And to the sense of a work of art – is this that? – that not only makes itself but also, and this is key, that unmakes itself as it goes along. Becomes a guide and the victim of circumstances.
Together, each of us in this collective process has entered and wandered amongst the sites/signs of this Dérive. Signs that reflect the singularity and generality of the world around us whilst disorienting us, as participants and those that might care to drift as visitors, through its layers. The images, thoughts, fragments are not intended to add up to a whole but, together, offer a chance to glimpse or intuit connections that lie on the periphery of any or all pictorialization of our human, social, political and marginal landscapes.
We seem to have slipped into this process and these virtual layers as predatory outsiders: as wanderers moving under the radar, scouring and tracking the ground, migrant-like, in a series of virtual places become feral realities. Like, but not quite as innocent as, Guy Debord’s lost children, we appropriate[d], explore[d] and survey[ed] a world punctuated by passages, lanes, streets, tracks, pathways, threads, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and open vistas; meetings and partings too. Each, metaphorically, acted as one part or participle in the threads of a collective journey: each understanding/misunderstanding as we, each in our way, found or lost the track …
as I watch
she drops her catch
catches her breath
watches
the cicada move
watches too
her three kittens
closing in on the
disabled creature
(Girne – Kyrenia 2016)
JH
Other participants in this aspect of the CCFT Buffer Fringe project, 'fluid territories – a nomadic on-line dialogue', include: firstly, students of Fine Art and Architecture from Universities of Nicosia, Bergen, and Nottingham Trent, and from Glasgow School of Art; including undergraduate and doctoral researchers; secondly, participants of the event at Ayios Sozomenos, ‘Ayios Sozomenos – place of barley’ – ‘Timeless Encounters’ (23-26.03.2018) and invited others.
Participants were invited to contribute by submitting relevant work(s) in the forms of: images, text, or short sound or video works or documentation from performances ... whatever felt relevant to the theme(s) of Belonging and /or Displacement; interpretation being as specific or broad as the artist/researcher desired.
In the spirit of this nomadic on-line dialogue, contributors were invited to make work between 16 October and 6 November 2020, so that all participants and collaborators would be working within the same timeframe.
CCFT is very grateful for the generosity of all its contributors. Note that in all cases, the artist's copyright is maintained.
Thalweg,
site, land, elements, borders
made on the Our River, between Luxembourg and Germany
Katharine Wilson Hilferty, 2019, 35mm film with overlaid text
'Settlers and Strangers', Lily Garget. (GSA)
Glasgow
3 Nov 2020
Rug made from acrylic wool and Shetland wool mix, buttons and hessian.
Belonging and Displacement explored through the lifecycle of eels.
memory(‘d) image
black rock carved into rolling curve,
distanced now by scene,
cloud...
factories* spin in infinite.
O amid soft mind you now sit,
… lines lead to no-where and rest.
To be so caught,
in rolling motion yet still...
Still, I wander along your many banks,
all but desolate save for brittle green, green moss.
*Cloud Factories; a romanticised term of affection for Iceland’s geothermal power stations.
During the 20th century, Iceland went from what was one of Europe's poorest countries,
dependent upon peat and imported coal for its energy, to a country with a high standard of
living where practically all stationary energy is derived from renewable resources. Geothermal
power facilities currently generate 25% of the country's total electricity production. During the
process the facilities emit steam, forming clouds which transform and blur the landscape.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAYQs6Yu820]
Pelo y Piedra (August 2020)
Maria Viña, Castro Santa Trega, Galicia, Spain
Medium: Performance in garment: (muslin painted & printed with ground human hair, egg yolk, linseed oil, gum arabic, honey) stitched with spun human hair
Collaborators: Alison Viña on camera, Alice Peacock & Hebe Ramsay- hair donations. The unnamed bronze age people who built Castro Santa Trega
'Pilgrimage in water', Ciaran Cannon (GSA)
Lochs near Glasgow:
Loch Lomond–Milarrochy and Balmaha, Loch Ardinning, and Dumbrock Loch
October and November 2020
Three Digital Images: Photographs, body prints and 'finds'
Through this work I am reconnecting with my body after surgery and also with the environment of Scotland, near Glasgow, where I live. Stepping into the cold water I feel alive and present. Facing my fear and diving down into the depths, I collect an offering from the loch. I must open to the mystery of the unknown to receive these gifts.
ORGINAL & FAKE QUAICHS
Artists Paria Moazemi Goodarzi and Francisco Andres Llinas Casas in collaboration with Sakinah Women's Group 'Al Meezan' and with the help of Glasgow Museum Resource Centre, have produced this collection of objects in response to notions of cultural hybridity, displacement, representation, intersubjective sense of belonging, andmuseums as spaces for alternative critical learning.
Sakinah Women’s Group were invited to produce a series of Scottish Quaichs in Papier-Mâché over a series of workshops facilitated by the artists. Pieces were later decorated by participants, responding to Middle Eastern objects in the museum’s collection and a discussion with the museum’s curator of Islamic Art.
The finished pieces serve as embodiments of cultural hybridity and draw an analogy between the displaced nature of the museum object and the group’s stories of migration. The work also reflects on the role of the museum space as the place for cultural representation of contemporary British society confronted by the colonial reality of its collection and building. Moreover, the reproduction of Quaichs in a paper medium and by Muslim hands, comments on the function of the finished object in contrast to the original purpose of quaichs as ceremonial vessels for alcohol drinking.
The work will remain in the museum’s civic collection as a tangible historical record of the true nature of our contemporary society, and as evidence of the processes through which nationhood, culture and society are negotiated, transformed and represented.
Original & Fake Quaichs
Francisco Llinas Casas & Paria Moazemi Goodarzi, Glasgow, 2020
Medium: Papier-Mâché, paint, various decorative beads.
Collaborators: Sakinah Women's Group 'Al Meezan', Glasgow Museum Resource Centre.
In the name of regeneration
Solway street; my home; my community; our shared site
Surrounded by works and commuters, day and night
This place I called home was my caravan site
Before then a housing estate
Before then an industrial factory site
Now a wasteland takes its place
In the name of regeneration
There was once a family of red breasts and blue tits
They would visit and tap the window to say hello
Their home, like mine is gone now
In the name of regeneration
I sometimes fed a fox by hand
The last time she visited she only had three legs
I wonder now if the JCB driver feeds her
Or if she has made a new den on new land
In the name of regeneration
The area they call French Street, we called ‘The Grass’
We climbed the trees, picked bushes from our hair
I played, I cried, I grew, I found my voice there
Now a no-man’s land
Moved-on; Fenced off
In the name of regeneration
The bushes were uprooted, our trailers moved far away
This land is no longer ours; a devoured community
Now all of this a distant and fleeting memory
Displaced; Out of sight
In the name of regeneration
'Falling Glass Boy', Selma Makela
We don’t know much about Glass boy, only that my mother found him lying in rubble after the Russian bombing of Kouvala, during the Winter war of 1941. They had heard the bombs fall all night. A few days later, as a young girl, she wandered through the bombed out town with her sisters, and found him lying in the rubble of a house. She never spoke about the war, or about my Grandfather, one of the only men in his village to return alive. But she kept this glass boy all her life. He arrived with her by boat from Helsinki to London, where he stayed on her dressing table for 50 years, until he arrived by car and another boat to Ireland, where now he sits on my desk.
The unspoken history lives like the weather, ‘falling lightly’ from the North today.
In- Between (Feb. 2020)
Paria M.Goodarzi (Glasgow School of Art)
Metal, fabric, acrylic mirror, jesmonite, ratchet ties, polycarbonate, metal pins.
The constant dialogue between the body and landscape is not always understood or harmonious; this interaction can be disturbing, interrupting and disconnecting. Today we are Experiencing social and political changes that result in devotion and displacement of people from their lands and culture in order to find safety and stability in other places.
This work is a response to those unheard voices that subjected to this conflict, loss and experienced the position of otherness. The reflection and the position of the body against the landscape uncovers different layers of meaning such as our relationship with the natural world and our protagonism in the process of urbanization and our social identity.
'Ghostline', Selma Makela
Cyprus 1974
My Finnish Grandmother has made me a new red and blue dress to wear to Cyprus. She sent it by post to London. I wear my new dress, as we step out onto the runway of Nicosia airport. Up in the balcony of the watchtower, is my grandfather, a bald headed man I have never met before. He is waving to us from the balcony as we step off the plane.
Later I am on another balcony, I am watching tanks pass by my grandparents house, on a wide open dusty road….We are flown back to London, I don’t remember the flight, but back in London, I hear my parents talking - how my grandparents had to hide in haystacks, and of people fleeing so fast their washing was still left out on lines.
Diplorasis is located inside an abandoned house that is located in the area of Agios Andreas - near the buffer zone. Diplorasis takes the form of a mirrored corridor slicing through the main entrance of the house. Upon entering the house the participant is confronted with a specular tunnel. The participant's transitions from the interior residential space to a space of multiple reflections. Once the participant reaches the far end of the corridor they are not prepared for what is in store. Through a cavity, the participant is able to observe themselves in moments past, and present in three-dimensional formats. One sees oneself seeing oneself, creating an out-of-body experience. The body becomes untethered from itself.
Andrea Jaeger
Groundless belonging
Mixed media
2020
Nottingham, UK
Groundless belonging, Nonlinearity, Critical Plant Studies, Material Imagination, Material Engagement, Production of Space, Production Aesthetics
'Elsewhere', Selma Makela
The wind was my first skin, a transparent moving vernix, that carried us through the world.
'Home in a foreign place?', Aurelie Chan Hon Sen (GSA)
Location: Glasgow and Mauritius
24 Oct 2020 - 03 Nov 2020,
Medium: spices, food, kitchen, cooking, Zoom, iPhone Voice Memos, mobile phone
Collaborators: my parents and my aunt
Credits: my aunt, my parents, Zapslat- Sounds- Alan McKinney, Epidemic Sound- SFX Producer
Serap Kanay
Medium: Photographs: Hand Writing on Vellum-Recycled from previous work made in 2014
Photograph of a Performance (Agios Sergios)
Text with image
Photograph of Old Turkish Street Name in Baf (Paphos)
Title: Memory Lane Kite
Themes: Both Belonging and Dislocation as well as Memory
'Something in the Water', Amy Strzoda (GSA)
Video
Kelvingrove Park, 30/10/2020
Working with warping tedious representations of reality.
SLOW DEEP MAPPING
Sevina Floridou
Solvitur Ambulando - it is solved by walking. Vanished, invisible underground irrigation in the landscape, punctuates the surface with round shafts, stumbled upon as dark circular apertures. Rectangular noria wells, alakatia, also abound, as do shallow stone water basins with dressed corners and carved spouts. Coming upon anthropogenic constructs, drawn again and again into a ritual lifetime walkabout, toponyms read back to their languages of origin, relating how the land was irrigated and by whom. Words spread jumbled up together, of French, Turkish, Arabic, Italian and Greek decent, with no seemingly particular order that is meaningful to us today. Elements of the irrigation network came to life in long talks and cherasma, in the coffee-shop, now borded up. Those interviewed would always quitely insist on paying for my coffee, lemonade or mahalebi, while I asked questions and they would reminisce out loud, prompting other coffee-club regulars to chip in.
What these maps bring forth might seem meagre to a casual or less knowledgable eye.
A toponym pencilled in on a casual 1996 mapping of an area beween Ayios Sozomenos and Potamia, identifies grandly as a main water basin at the entry porte, Neron tou Portolaoumou, but beside a locality of slaves (before or after?). This basin would have been surrounded by lush orchards of orange, mullberry and pomegranate trees as in the 14th c. Unicorn Tapestries, which allow us to imagine that where today a black plastic water pipe snakes in the dry grass, water gushed out of a remembered carved lion spout, and into earth channels amidst a profusion of vegetation lining their narrow banks. Elsewhere, we read that Lusignan Kings hunted antlered deer with leopards; pheasants would have drunk at this fountain, birds would have pecked at olives (hence made softer and tastier according to my nene, after they had been thus bruised and soaked in brine). Potamia manor would have also peeked out of verdant foliage in the background just as its ruins did in 1960 aerial photographs. Or as in one photo with a young soldier conscript, posing with his gun while guarding a cease-fire border in the south orchard when the manor, turned chiftlik, was further appropriated into barracks after 1974. In our mind's eye, slow mappings insert now vanished verdure and remove all borders as we walk along.
