image credit: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Pat Naldi – AER Resident 2016
The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) was launched in 2015 by member of the UAL Research Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) and UAL Chair of Art and the Environment Professor Lucy Orta and coordinated by CSF Associate Curator Camilla Palestra.
We can announce that Gonçalo Birra – MA Fine Art 2016 Alumni, Chelsea College of Arts has been selected for this years’ AER 2017 Residency at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) seeks to provide a centre of international, national and regional importance for the production, exhibition and appreciation of modern and contemporary sculpture.
The revelatory nature of YSP opens up possibilities and encourages exploration of the relationship between art and nature, stimulating engagement and adventure in the surroundings.
This residency takes place within the grounds of YSP, giving privileged out-of-hours access to respond to the park’s diverse natural environment, as well as a unique opportunity to create work that can engage with the YSP visitors in new ways.
Read Gonçalo’s successful application here:
Being deeply informed by a continuous research and interest in contemporary political, social, economic and environmental issues circulating through the media (especially the violent discourses directed at minorities such as queer and migrant bodies within contemporary westernized societies), my artistic practice navigates and operates through different media and approaches to making – sculpture, assemblage, garment making (manufacturing), writing, video and painting.
image courtesy of Gonçalo Birra
Departing from my own body and the ways in which it is affected by its encounters with other Others, the work proposes scenarios where Things (objects, bodies and others) have been reconsidered and queered as if their narratives and what they mean is no longer fixated onto their surfaces.
image courtesy of Gonçalo Birra
Considering what happens on the surfaces of Things, and how these impressions reveal the thing’s relationship to the environment to which it is violently and precariously exposed, I explore anecdotal references to citizenship and the work of human rights, and the fixity of words circulated through mass media, e.g. the usage of the word ‘jungle’ when referring to the place where human lives (refugees) were occupying as homes in Calais, France, fixating it onto those fleeing bodies as if they were wild animals instead of human.
Ideas of domesticity, home and familiarity are present in the way the work is conceived as to suggest an absurd scenario where one is able to establish a relationship to the recognizable features of certain arrangements, assemblages and/or the objects and material’s surfaces themselves i.e. proposing a relatable platform for the work to perform its anecdotal and metaphorical nature – from the elements recognizable as familiar e.g a mug, to the referencing of e.g. Brexit.
image courtesy of Gonçalo Birra
The artistic practice is also informed by an academic and professional background in the Fashion industry/ discipline and Industrial Design (BA (Hons) Fashion and FdA Design), exploring questions of sustainability and production through the manufacturing of clothes and objects that fail to accomplish ideas of reproduction, function and/or meaning, leaving the price of clothing or utensil to perform its failure together with the Others in the space where they have been placed.
AER is the most suitable platform for my work to develop and for it to be exposed and challenged through this residency’s context and programme, as the practice is concerned with contemporary issues of diaspora/migration, the affected bodies by the work of human rights and the pressuring environmental politics of today.
This opportunity at YSP and the support it provides, not only technically but also with its context and history, would enable me to effectively tackle and develop further the questions and enquiry that my work proposes, now in a different yet challenging setting.
As part of the AER Residency agreement, Stephen Bennett will be writing a report upon completion of his time at Joya: arte + ecología which will be published on this blog site.
Read previous AER Residency Reports here
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