by As part of the University of Canberra’s 2019 Faculty of Art and Design staff and affiliates group exhibition, I am presenting a number of videopoems that gather together images, ambient sounds and poems from Barcelona, Australia, Singapore and Chiang Mai (Thailand). Drawing from personal experience living in these places, I endeavoured to make sense of my experience as a translocal poet.
These multiple perceptions of place, neither home nor foreign but some ‘other place’ that slides between the two, reflect the migrant experience of maintaining an awareness of multiple localities, sometimes simultaneously. The videopoems create a place where everything is different and changing – sound from Barcelona overlaid on a beach in Victoria while the poem muses on sea trade in Singapore – where multiple references and reiterations allude to ‘a simultaneous situatedness across different locales which provide ways of understanding the overlapping place-time(s) in migrants’ everyday lives’ (Bricknell and Datta, 2011, p. 4). These works seek to explore the unstable zones between places, investigating the discomforts alongside the allusive sensation of feeling at home.
(Dash)topia is a group exhibition curated by Jordan Williams that explores possibilities of topia: utopia and dystopia for two, but also heterotopia, ecotopia, technotopia and any other combination which arises from the artist’s specification of place.
The (Dash)topia exhibition runs from Wednesday 30 October to Sunday 17 November 2019 at ANCA Gallery in Canberra, Australia.
Claire Rosslyn Wilson 