Barcelona in a Bag

(Still from my new film called, With You.)

Life’s a bit full on at the moment, but in infinitely good and exciting ways. My work with Overtone Productions for the Radio 4 programme, The Art of Now: Return to Catalonia, continues apace and is all consuming, partly because we have such a short window in which to make it. It’s also a compelling piece of work to be making at this time of high tension and uncertainty in Catalonia.

I am loving working with Overtone who make this easy for me, and are infinitely encouraging about all the sound pieces I’m recording ahead of our trip to France and Spain next week. The process of recording myself is in itself fascinating – a new form to learn about and enjoy from behind the scenes.

Mainly, I find myself thrown headlong into an intensely personal creative exploration where family history, the recent conflicts in Catalonia, and the opportunity to extend (embody & flesh out) the visual language of my practice collide. I’ve been scared at times that this could get messy, and I still don’t quite know what my journey will bring, but I feel so well held by Overtone and the various people now supporting this project in Barcelona that I’m mostly reassured and have begun thinking about my work in terms of transmission and reception. Amid the fear engendered by buried trauma (a second generation inheritance called postmemory) there is a new sense of welcome which opens out possibility. This is deeply inspiring on the importance of welcome and receptivity in both cultural and human terms.

The title to a Nora Jones song – Strange Transmissions – has worked its way into my brain in relation to recent conversations with Dr Helena Buffery. She works with me on my father’s plays and together we try to make sense of his creative project in the context of Spanish exile. She has also facilitated the reception for my work in Barcelona. It’s immensely beneficial to the preparation to have a sense of arrival for the project once we hit Spain.

Intense processing has led me to what I hope will be a coherent outcome in terms of the art-making side of the programme. I now have a plan, and it’s a pretty tight one at that. With so few days on the road – traveling in quick succession through the camps of Frances at Argelès and Barcarès, over the border at La Jonquera and then on to Barcelona – I’ve needed to think this through in the finest of detail possible.

Last week we recorded the English leg of our journey at Shipton-under-Wychwood. It was a cold and soggy day with enough time spent outdoors to thoroughly soak our feet and test out our waterproofs – mine being newly acquired for the purposes of this journey. It was a good excuse to equip myself properly and has paid for itself already by enabling me to film on location and capture footage I’m incredibly pleased with. It couldn’t have gone better I feel, and rain added a perfect melancholy and depth to the work.

So I’ve created a new film to take with me to Spain called, With You – which I’ll upload on this blog nearer the time of the programme – the still capture (shown above) has been taken over a transition. I’m excited by this effect and the way in which it says exactly what I want to convey about the layers of my project by superimposing one image over another.

Yesterday I cracked the piece for the final leg of my journey in a momentary flash of inspiration on acquiring a new and unexpected object. I can’t wait to share this with listeners to Radio 4. Tune in on the 19th March at 4pm and all will be revealed!

The Art of Now: A Return to Catalonia

BBC Radio 4
Transmission Date Monday, 19th March 2018, 4pm
Presented by Sonia Boué
Produced by Anna Scott-Brown

So I’m finally returning. I can’t help wondering what Abuela (grandma) would say?

I wish too that my father could know that I am going back to Catalonia, via the beaches of Barcarès and Argèles (where he was held in refugee interment camps), to retrace his exile journey to England in 1939.

At the age of 18, he, along with 500,000 other Spaniards, fled for his life across the border to France. I have spent the last five years building a body of work in response to this family history, and have also cast my net wider to encompass figures such as British artist and Spanish Civil War volunteer, Felicia Browne, and the exiled Spanish writer and broadcaster, Arturo Barea.

Now, I have been asked to make a programme for Radio 4 with Overtone Productions, and my question about taking my practice to Spain will in part be answered. I will be retracing my father’s footsteps and creating responses along the way. We have a very short timeframe to make this programme and so I’m thrown into sifting and planning (in ways I am very conscious the exiles couldn’t) the artistic side of my journey.

The job feels vast, and at times overwhelming in the time available – not helped by a brain which  likes to canter off in 10 directions at once. Reigning in and staying focused is the thing. Here is where my obsessive nature is hugely beneficial to my work. I dig in and apply myself to the detail.

My feel for the bigger picture is pure intuition – I trust I can make the stages of my journey join up by getting each stage right conceptually speaking. My work is made easier because I can draw on some existing pieces in my growing collection, but I will be making new responses and hoping to bring them all together by the end of the programme.

I’m brimming with gratitude to Overtone Productions for pitching this programme, and feel a weight of responsibility – this is a highly sensitive history. Also lurking is the spectre of inherited trauma – as I probe more deeply into it I gain a firmer grasp on the terror through which this history was suppressed. I hear new information from my mother which confirms it and brings it closer.

I feel my father’s fear as though it were my own. As though it were live.

I conclude that it is. This is what we mean by the term, postmemory. Recent events in Catalonia serve to demonstrate how difficult Spanish history is, how tensions remain from the unresolved legacies of the Civil War.

I won’t really know how to respond until I get to the beach of Barcarès, or until I’m confronted with the entrance to my grandmother’s flat (which she left in 1975) in the Barceloneta. All I can do is plan and pack my suitcases full of artistic possibility.

Each morning I pinch myself anew. Somehow I’ve landed the job of my dreams.