It’s funny how an unpronouncable volcano has managed to affect everyone. Tuesday the 20th of April saw the opening of Ouvrage a collaborative project exhibiting at BIAD School of Art. Except there was someone missing! – Francoise Dupre, the artist who started it all and has carried the work itself across europe, was stuck in Istanbul, along with thousands of others travellers. So myself and the other student collaborator Rebecca Snow, had the nerve-wrecking task of opening the show ourselves.
Ouvrage began in 2009, when Francoise invitied Rebecca and I to accompany her on a trip to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzgovina. We stayed there for a month, exploring the city, researching its history, and holding participatory workshops with the local women’s group ‘Novi Pogled’ at the French Cultural Centre where Francoise had her residency.
Francoise Dupre’s practice is inherently particpatory, and the participants are given an active role in the decision making. Dupre also works with the everyday and the familliar – using traditional craft processes such as french knitting, and recycled materials to create textured and highly decorative pieces of work.
It was exciting, and hot, and overwhelming. Mostar is nothing like Birmingham, or any British city, and at the same time surprisingly familliar. We felt like tourists, and we absorbed as much as we could from that position – outsiders looking in.
It seems apparent, now that the work has travelled to Birmingham, that my stay in Mostar has in fact effected my practice quite profoundly.
The position of a tourist, the alienation, the misunderstandings, the cultural shock – these are all part of the distance of otherness, than I am intersted in exploring with my own work. I was amazed at how the other young people we met shared the same main cultural influence as us – American Television. We found ourselves having quite lengthy discussions about ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Family Guy’, and this common ground was immensely valuable, like the one anchor of familliarity that we could cling to, when everything else felt so unreal.
My current work explores Otherness through the culture of popular television, where essentially the viewer becomes a tourist in the world portrayed on screen. I hope that the final work will articulate this idea of Otherness being something that exists ‘at a distance’ – the same sense of alienation that is felt when visiting a foriegn land. This distance is our own construction, we use it as a tool to define ourselves more clearly.
It seems that human beings are relational by nature; our sense if how we relate to Others is both subject-forming yet simulaneously also formed, or invented, by us. This notion that our own sense of self and understanding of the Other is in fact part of a fiction that makes up our idea of reality is at the core of what I am dealing with.
Now as Ouvrage hangs in the BIAD School of Art Foyer, it has a sense of memorabilia about it. It’s out-of-place-ness adds to its potence, and my appreciation of it.
