This blog post, comes hot on the heels of my last critical post on The Waiting Room: Spanish Exile in the United Kingdom exhibition at the Cervantes Institute in London. I found the exhibition a hugely challenging experience on both a personal and a creative level. This was not an exile story I could relate to, but an officially sanitised version in which the ‘important bits” had been left out. Faced head on with the weight of historical denial my resolve to keep going with my post memory project was all but crushed that day. Writing that piece and publishing a countervailing perspective has been an important move in rallying phoenix-like but momentarily I knew exactly how it felt to be erased. So I am joyful for the silver side of this internet age (for now at least and in some parts of the globe – we need only look to China to see how it could be). What a contrast with the information dam my father and his generation faced in this pre-tech era. Yet they kept going in so many creative and multi-stranded ways – of course I must do the same, in my own small way.
They are therefore wholly related blog posts as these images come from a performance piece entitled UNPACKING EXILE for the Fringe Arts Bath festival. I enact the gagging by the Franco regime and continued suppression of memory in the contemporary with a silent performance and taped-up mouth, yet speak for the victims with objects and hands as I mount my ‘shrine’ to my Republican family members. I am, of course, honouring all victims and use family in the larger sense too. During the performance I channel my muses with music through earphones, which my audience cannot hear. I am taped up and sealed in by sound, cut off (in an exile of sorts) but also transported to the zone in which I create all my work for this project.
I am very grateful to curator Nimmi Naidoo for providing the impetus to create this piece, and the space to enact this performance ritual with a receptive and highly engaged audience. An artist can ask for no more. I have found a performative space (within me and in the actual) which is powerful and does translate. For me performance has become a diving deep within myself, a zoning out and tuning in – a public display of the most intimate process.
It’s becoming clear that the nature of my project means that I don’t just make art, I live it and breathe it. I am my art and my art is me. Me is exile – my voice is an exiled voice. In performance – you the audience and I – we (if I can take you with me) become momentarily exile voices.
I will henceforth be seeking new audiences and venues for performances of ritual tributes and will embrace and develop further this side of my practice.
