INDIVIDUAL RESIDENCIES 2022

The Museum of Loss and Renewal hosted a wide range of new residents in 2022. Each resident brought energy and a specific focus to our little village of Collemacchia, in the municipality of Filignano in Italy’s Molise region, where they were welcomed, nurtured and cared for.

OCTOBER / NOVEMBER 2022 | Liz Bahs

This piece was inspired by my encounters with the artist Anastasia Pelias when we were living in side-by-side remote cabins as part of a residency in the North Georgia Mountains, USA.

My work reveals its form as I begin to write and the writing from my new creative nonfiction project is appearing as a poetry / prose hybrid laced with sequences and haibun. It may be travel-memoir or even part family biography. It plays with questions such as: What does it mean to be from / of a place? and What does it mean to belong? Its language is of botany, sculpture, music, and landscape. I have been inspired by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s approach to questioning her place in the world in her book The Grassling, as well as Betsy Warland and M.C. Richards’s work with breath and centering.  
 
Alongside this creative play, I completed an article I was writing on polyphony in Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poetry collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.

https://whenyoureadtome.blogspot.com/

OCTOBER 2022 | Patricia O’Donnell

Travel shakes up preconceptions and forces us to re-see and re-think what we know. The travel I enjoy most is that which gives time and space to translate new ways of seeing the world into words. Something about travel, the very lack of comfort and ease we have become accustomed to in familiar settings, jars the mind and emotions in ways that can bring energy to the work. When that discomfort is relieved by the quiet and comfort available at The Museum of Loss and Renewal residency, writing becomes necessary.

My fiction is deeply rooted in character, but I believe that place is instrumental in shaping character. Stories I have written in the past were inspired by travels in Scotland, South Africa, Ireland, and Italy. While revising a new completed novel, I wrote more short fictions using the sense of place and culture I experience in Collemacchia.

https://patriciaodonnell.weebly.com/

OCTOBER 2022 | Michael Burke

I worked on a nonfiction manuscript while in residence. It was an eclectic mix of memories, observations, social history, nature writing, and whatever else came to mind. It was inspired to some degree by two books by the late Evan S. Connell, in particular Points for a Compass Rose. The segmented form and the sense of accrual such a form allows, has always been very attractive to me, and I want to see where this project goes.

I also did some editing work, on a collection of previously published nonfiction and on two plays.

https://web.colby.edu/mdburke/

OCTOBER 2022 | Emma Willis

Left to right: Saco Bosco, Bomarzo, Italy; Désert de Retz, Chambourcy, France; Parc de la Villette, Paris, France

I am making future ruins,
Relics for a history that someone else will write.
The writer of this history will speak – if people still speak – about what they mean:
The ancient mythologies
The time of bodies
The time of time, and of bodies marked by time, marking time.
“Look, here is an arm
And there, outstretched fingers
Reaching for a future she will never know
And living a past we can only pretend to remember.”

While in residence, I worked on the creative elements of Imagination in Ruins/Love in a Dream, my response to the practices of architectural folly making from the Baroque period to the present. In intertwining materiality and whimsy, I’ve been taken by how such sites invite contemplation and a type of creative dreaming.

I am also interested in the texts that influenced them, including Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, and Henry Hawkin’s Parthenia Sacra. Binding these texts and sites are yearning, mourning, dreaming, a love of nature and art, and, ultimately, interior transformation. My project has explored these affects through both site visits and writing, ultimately working towards a digital artefact combining textual and audio-visual elements.

https://auckland.academia.edu/EmmaWillis

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2022 | Sally Traxler-Lavengood

Peridot, 2022 – oil on mounted postcard, part of a 50 part series of small paintings on Pantone squares

My project while at The Museum of Loss and Renewal was a part of the process of grieving the loss of my grandmother. She was a collector of beautiful objects. Her passion was thrifted jewellery that she wore in bulk with absolutely no restraint and gave away on the spot to anyone who she thought might enjoy them.

My residency came at the end of a trip around Belgium where my grandmother spent her childhood. Using pieces of her jewellery lent to me by family members as reference, the paintings produced during this time centred around detailed depictions of these objects. It was a deeply personal project but produced work that allow even more people to see and enjoy my grandmother’s beautiful items, collected over her lifetime.

https://sallytraxlerlavengood.com

SEPTEMBER 2022 | Zoë Darbyshire

Bound, 2019 – Installation and Performance

My perception of the residency in Collemacchia was as ‘field’ activity, engaging with body, imagination, and research. With a practice centered on walking, I explored the area looking to encounter traces or pathways leading to material, dance, space, sound, and people, both apparent and residual.

Provoking the mishmash of writing, choreographies and sketches that evolved, I played and improvised, clustering and distilling these elements in various iterations, effectively filtering and forming ideas and highlighting subtle threads of connection. Insights from an earlier exhibition in May and Butoh training during the summer informed these processes.

With time to reflect on my practice, this opportunity allowed distance and perspective to objectively examine my projected short and longer-term developments. I was excited to be in the company of other creatives with opportunities to engage and potentially collaborate.

This transformative and nourishing experience charged my creativity and professional interest in developing collaborative relationships with place and artists from various disciplines.

https://www.instagram.com/darbyshirezoe

SEPTEMBER 2022 | Ben Jenner

Formula II, 2022

For the duration of my stay at The Museum of Loss and Renewal I expanded upon a body of work that explored the idea of discerning a narrative through reading asemic writing. Asemic writing is loosely defined as being a body of handwritten marks that look like the written word, but are void of semantic content. Therefore the reading we deduce from the writing is emotive, and allows for understanding to happen across all linguistic meaning.

I eagerly immersed myself in a setting that was ‘foreign’ to me, to explore these ideas where the language spoken was not my mother tongue. How might a language that I do not understand look visually? Time spent amongst the local community stimulated fresh ideas that celebrated this poetic tension. 

www.benjenner.co.uk

SEPTEMBER 2022 | Nick Gadd

Derelict Bradmill clothing factory, Yarraville, Victoria, Australia

I am an Australian author of novels and memoir. My work, informed by psychogeography, explores the connections between people, places and memory. I am interested in the layered histories of places – manifested in details of architecture, derelict buildings, edgelands, old signage and other traces of the past – and the ways that familiar places become infused with memories, thoughts and feelings.

My most recent book, Melbourne Circle: Walking, Memory and Loss (2020) is an account of a two-year walk around the city of Melbourne with my late wife Lynne, who died of cancer a short time after the walk was completed. The book is about lost places and forgotten stories, as well as a personal memoir about grief and regeneration. In my current work I continue to investigate these themes.

In the ancient village of Collemacchia I encountered a richness of layered stories that inspired new writings in fiction and non-fiction.

https://melbournecircle.net

SEPTEMBER 2022 | Kate Clayton

I am a queer performance artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. I work collaboratively, collectively and individually. My focus is on the visibility of older women, in what is, in part, an attempt to claim agency for the over-60s and 70s.

My methodology includes intergenerational friendship and the collaborative process. Artistic personas include Silver Swimmer, Art Scrubber, Bus Pass, Pearl Compost and Constance Spry, performed in various contexts and environments: public spaces, galleries, domestically, in cabaret and within the landscape. My practice exists under the overall banner of ‘NOT DEAD YET’.

In Collemacchia I am developing Silver Swimmer by researching a trip to the east or west coast of Italy, engaging a ‘photographer’ through networking to photograph the persona as she stands on the coast. The sea behind her. The rest of her life in front of her. A marker in time.

https://kateclayton.co.uk

SEPTEMBER 2022 | Fritha Langerman

Extinction Codex

Extinction Ark

As many residents before me, I too am interested in the surrounding ancient forests as a starting point of creative production. In a previous series of linocuts that reflected on extinction narratives and representations of natural history, I referred to Uccello and Botticelli’s’ hunting and forest paintings. While forests are the subject of much creative response to environmental challenges, I am concerned with their deep history, and in this spatial context, within western thinking.

I am influenced by Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests (1992) and what he identifies as the symbolic space forests occupy both at the edge of civilization, the place where mythologies are established, as simultaneous places of refuge and places that deny passage. He writes that for the celestial religions of the world to develop, forest had to be felled so that a pathway through the canopy to the heavens could be opened. In addition, the forests became the raw material of conquest and colony, providing for centuries wood for ships and wagons. I am interested in what this opening of tree space means symbolically, and the paradox that clearing and seeming clarity produces collapse and subjugation.

I involved myself in close and slow looking over the period of the residency, looking down and up, but never sideways: at the forest floor, the canopy, the constellations, the humus. I explored compositional devices that crowd, flatten and deny hierarchy or dominance, compressing figure/ground relationships as a reflection on the full and felled forest and the associated tensions between them.

https://frithalangerman.com

SEPTEMBER 2022 | Katja Hock

My work constantly plays with our perception, deliberately challenging the distinctions between drawing, still photography and film, while exploring the relationship between what is visible and that which might only be suggested. Most recently I created alternative galleries, projecting my work onto different surfaces and buildings that are of historical and political relevance to the projected subject itself, linking surfaces and narratives that are connected but separated through time and space; time is no longer linear but circular; the past becomes our present as we are asked to look into the future.

During my residency, I explore those relationships by returning to the matter and materials of the represented itself. Through the employment of my senses, and engagement with surfaces such as skin, stone, sand, and paper while investigating their ways of connecting to their immediate environment, I ruminate on not only my being in this world as ‘matter’ but also question our place as ‘material’ within a wider historical and political context.

https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/art-design/katja-hock

AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2022 | Ren Gregorčič

Ren Gregorčič, Parks Way, 2022. Single channel video, digital asset and sound expression. 3:45 min. Image courtesy the artist

During my time at The Museum of Loss and Renewal I developed a new research-led body of work that responds to the urban structures, infrastructure and spatial configurations that exist within the specific context of Collemacchia.  

This residency enabled the continuation of my interest in interrogating the nature of functional urban structures and elements (such as hydrological systems, tunnels, bridges, bricks and concrete slabs), how urban structures and elements are used to support and maintain systems of logic (for example, the way that hydrological systems process and carry water away from urban centres to catchments), and the impacts of the systems of logic on both human and non-human agents (including plants, minerals, water, and light).

www.rengregorcic.com

MARCH / APRIL + AUGUST 2022 | Steve Dutton

This was a return visit to The Museum of Loss and Renewal. The last time I was here I described my work as a form of tussle between conflicting forces, agendas, politics, subjectivities and aspirations. While this observation might remain true as a lofty ambition, it should also be said that the means of engaging in that tussle are becoming ever more materially straightforward and grounded in particular spaces and times.

I work with language in the broadest sense, working through drawing, text, writing, speaking, reading, looking and listening and I attempt to move across and through these various modes by allowing each to be inhabited or at least touched by another.

I remain hopeful that by engaging in this way I can allow paradoxes, frictions, fissures and complexities to arrive, a reminder that engaging with contradictions might help energise a life being lived.

In the end, my project in The Museum of Loss and Renewal remains as an opportunity to engage with a simple proposition: that aesthetics might be the ability to think contradiction as a means of being in and out of a world simultaneously.

An incredibly powerful image for me is described in Don DeLillo’s “The Names”, in which the words “the names” are painted in bright red paint in Greek on a rock in the blisteringly hot landscape of the Mani Peninsula. The naming of things also lies at the heart of Ursula Le Guin’s writing.

www.axisweb.org/artist/stevedutton

JUNE 2022 | Han Le Han and Houaïda

Han Le Han, Ikebana arrangement

Houaïda, Live sound installation at Maxim Gorki Theater Lichtsaal with Talking Straight – D.N.A. 2017

We used our time at The Museum of Loss and Renewal to explore ways of linking our respective mediums of sound (Houaïda) and floral art (Han Le) into a collaborative practice. The thematic focus of our experimental undertaking lay in the overarching concept of “care”, and specifically on aspects of human life and afterlife within the broader context of socio-ecological care and chaplaincy.

The Museum of Loss and Renewal with its ecologically rich and undisturbed surroundings was the right place to initiate our collaboration and fuel a resourceful process of sharing, exchanging and connecting ideas. We worked together to find a mutual artistic approach that will enable us to convert our reflections into an immersive and participatory work at the Vleeshal, Centre for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, the Netherlands.

hanlehan.de
houaida.com

JUNE | Bruna Gomes

ETYMOLOGY
after Safia Elhillo

fact: the Portuguese surname oliveira translates to olive tree
fact: the olive tree is the most praised tree in Greece

if a Portuguese surname upholds a Greek symbol
will the Portuguese man

know his heart as a leaf of peace and offer it to the world
or
become a stranger to the foreign branch lodged in his chest

As a writer who digs up cultural and emotional history to plant it with new seeds, this residency was an opportunity to discover and understand how history interacts with its community and environment.

In Collemacchia’s historically rich area, I wrote a suite of short stories layered with distant memories and immediate emotions, focusing on juxtapositions within ‘foreign’ perceptions of Collemacchia’s heritage.

I aimed to craft a museum of memory; a textual exhibit both external and internal, an emotional timeline that is reflected in architecture, nature, food, and people.

https://linktr.ee/brunagomesauthor

JUNE | Paul Catanese

My artwork emerges from a hybrid and multi-modal creative practice that blurs the lines between fine, performing, and media arts, and crosses domains of knowledge including science and technology. For example, a current series of studies, collectively entitled The Responsibility of Breath, emerges from research conducted at the University of Michigan Stamps School in coordination with Michigan Medical Sleep and Circadian Research Laboratory.

Taking form as micro-performances, installations, videos, objects, sounds, texts, virtual environments, and musical gestures, these studies inform development for the next phase of my opera, Century of Progress / Sleep. These inquiries have been shaped by the events of the past several years. During this period defined by breath, watching breath as data, trying to hold breath (physically, conceptually, emotionally), the legibility, musicality, and potency of breath has emerged as a catalyst for generating form.

My motivation for applying for this residency was rooted in seeking time for reflection and research. I have been prototyping inflatable forms the past year, devised to hold breath, and function both as furniture for sleeping as well as sonorous sculptures. Created from heat-weldable fabric, the voicing for these sculptures is informed by harmonium, shruti, and bagpipe. Thus, it is fortuitous that the residency is near Scapoli, where I learned more about Zampogna (bagpipe) traditions and construction methods.

http://www.paulcatanese.com

MAY / JUNE | Penelope Bartlau and Jason Lehane

SALT (photograph by Oleksandr Pogorilyi)

We are collaborating, interdisciplinary artists and partners. We have begun early creative development on a multi-year, international project called Feathers and Earth. Collemacchia was the second site in our project. We planned to create and document a simple, locative, and ecologically sustainable installation at/for/with each site we visit. The volcanic terrain, salt lakes and extraordinary birdlife surrounding our studio in regional Australia have been the ignition point for our creative investigation.

Our concern is for the degradation of our natural world. Our aim is to explore cycles of decay, destruction and rebirth (feathers/birds) while looking at what may last beyond the annihilation of climate-change (earth). Our time at the residency included investigating flora and fauna as we explored and listened to the surrounding forests and terrain.

https://barkingspidertheatre.com.au/

MAY / JUNE | Demelza Kooij

I applied for a residency at The Museum of Loss and Renewal to write a script and do test-edits for a voice-over track for my feature documentary film Wolfpark. This project is the result of filming for several summers at a wolf sanctuary in Canada. I have a 50-minute rough cut of the film that requires a thorough reconsideration and the creation of a new storytelling perspective. The film is intended for festival and cinema release. Additionally, just like its spin-off project Wolves From Above, I created an accompanying installation work with the film, which I conceptualised during my stay.

Wolfpark is a poetic journey to a place where wolves and humans meet. Traversing a human and wolf gaze, the documentary film questions the natural and artificial, free and confined, and what is human and animal. The viewer is guided by my own voice, as well as the voices of the wolf keeper and park visitors. The film is an exploration of place and animal subjectivity. Its careful choreographing of a sound-image relation image allows the viewer to embody the film world and closely witness wolf life. Where there is voice-over, it is never pedantic or factual as in wildlife-programs. Instead, the film invites the viewer to listen, observe, and make their own judgements. Therefore, the voice-track will be a poetic and gentle guide that helps viewers to empathise with wolves and feel the poetics of space.

www.demelzakooij.com

MAY / JUNE | Judith Schrijver

I talked a lot as a child. Due to the lack of interested listeners and my urge to express my feelings and thoughts, I kept diaries from a very young age and I still do. Diagnosed with ADHD, I notice and focus on a lot of things at once, and my monologues and texts are an expression of this. I analyse my thoughts but at the same time I freely associate.

As an actress, singer and theatre maker I prepare for auditions, and I work as a text editor and a barista. Looking at my notebooks and diaries during the residency, I considered my ideas; a musical theatre play, a solo performance about Ophelia and women in visual art, a story about my job in healthcare, a love-story-gone-wrong between two young people.

In 2021, I wrote a solo performance about American artist Loïe Fuller, developed with Luc Debuyser and Akelei Loos in a 2020 residency part-funded by The Museum of Loss and Renewal.

www.judithschrijver.com

MAY / JUNE | Lydia Halcrow

For me the residency was about a slow tuning into a place that I do not know, as a mode to test a series of processes developed through working with a place I know well, in the UK. I see this as an open-ended jumping off point to test ideas / ways of working. Rather than leading to specific outcomes by the end of the residency, I developed approaches that I started to experiment with.
 
I undertook a series of daily walks in the environment close to the residency, alone and with others, to gather materials, thoughts, conversations and ideas (slowly). I liked to not know where this may end up, to be taken on an unexpected journey through different planned and unplanned interactions. The approach I adopted is playful and more about the doing/making than the thing being made.

www.lydiahalcrow.com

MAY / JUNE | Sandra O’Donnell

Memories float up unbidden and unwanted. They catch in my throat, welling up behind my eyes. There is the memory of the day I met Kim, us in Ireland, the way mine hand felt in his, the bittersweet memory of our last kiss, Kim on the floor of the bathroom unable to move. No! I will not retain that memory.

I make myself breathe. Deeply, slowly, in and out, in and out, in and out. I visualize Kim on the floor. I turn the image into a sheet of paper. I fold it over and over in my mind, turning it into a piece of memory origami. It becomes a paper memory bird, maybe a crow. In my mind, I see myself taking out a pair of sharp scissors. I cut the origami crow into confetti. I visualize myself blowing the memory away. I will not remember Kim that way.

Facing this loss, figuring out how to move on, is going to take all my superpowers. It will take everything I’ve learned over the years. It will take every internal resource I have. It will require taking myself apart and putting me back together, yet again.

Excerpt from my memoir

Loss and renewal are at the heart of both of the writing projects I worked on while at The Museum of Loss and Renewal. My work on grief is aimed toward revisioning grief, not as a set of linear steps we must climb but rather as part of life’s journey, complete with guides, signposts, and new phases of life.

I was finishing a memoir tentatively titled A Stacked Deck, that dives deep into the loss of partners, identity and life plans. Loss and renewal also resonate through my second book, about a group of Puritans from Scrooby, England that claimed religious persecution and prosecution as their reason for leaving England for Holland and then America. Rather than allow the journey to a new land to renew their faith, they fell into a narrative of loss, which I considered in relation to events in American society today.

https://www.sandrakodonnell.com/

MAY 2022 | Rina Treml