BSA Artist Residency 2025
The idea in development is a multimedia installation on the life and domestic dimension of historian and suffragette Emily Penrose, who was instrumental in securing the admission of women as full members of Oxford University and universities more generally.
The project starts as an artistic residency at the British School at Athens that will take a first performative shape in Spring 2025 in Athens. Through my University, UAL, and after a series of interviews and pitches made between internal university committees and BSA committees I eventually got the opportunity. The BSA holds, in their archives, Emily Penrose’s Mediterranean travels’ diary, which she wrote during her time at the BSA at the end of the 19th Century. I will write a performative libretto in first person which will be based on Emily Penrose’s personal papers as well as on artist Elin Karlsson, who wrote some fictional material based on her diaries.
The libretto will be donated to the BSA collection and will serve as the spine of a performative piece: it will be performed within an audio-visual scape made of field recordings, traditional chants and polyphonies of the time and places that Emily visited while travelling (Spain, Italy, Corsica, France), and visual recordings of memorabilia (photographs, objects, ceramics, from the collection as well).
The main research I am carrying through this project is to investigate breathing and the act of survival as an historical and archeological act. Through field sound recordings of the coastal and riverine areas, and its interaction with my voice and the voice of the area’s inhabitants where I will record (Athens and Corsica for now), I will play with the idea that we breathe in the same way as centuries ago and that sound never disappears and we are somehow still able to track glimpses of primordial sounds from centuries ago today.
My proposal has an immersive format and aims to engage the five senses: as a performer and singer, my interest in the coast and coastal, both physical and metaphorical, as to indicate the borders and containers that are our bodies, is key. The European coast(s) is a receptacle of fragmented and interconnected hybrid narratives: they remain hybrid, mobile, itinerant, fluid and reflect the same liminality that I am trying to explore as a Mediterranean singer-storyteller with my voice and performative practice. In my research, the investigation around what Barthes calls the “grain of the voice”, is a “form of bodily communication that circumvents the laws and limits of the linguistic sphere and reveals the materiality of language from within”. Voice is a subject/object entity, inhabitant of the split between the uniqueness of everyone’s voice and its socially constructed aspect. As a researcher and performer, I am interested in exploring the binarism between virtuosity and uniqueness/specificity of the voice, as well as investigating how this relates to the community environment as well as to the natural environment. The sound material collected and recorded as well as the reflections and embodied knowledge I will gain during the residency will be at the centre of the performance and they will be vital in answering one of my main research questions around how sound, voice and music can become a means for fostering connection and care, between artists and audiences as well as between artists.