Elevage de Poussière. Oliva Arts Centre, S. João Da Madeira, Portugal 2012-13

Artist’s Residency, Commission and Solo Exhibition, with publication.
Title: Exhibition: Elevage de Poussière
Residency: Oliva/Rewind
Location of output: Exhibition: Oliva Arts Centre, S. João Da Madeira, Portugal
Residency, Workshops: Paços da Cultura, S. João Da Madeira, Portugal
Number of Pieces: 60
Media: mixed-media
Residency, Commission and workshops:
Opening date: 7 May 2012
Closing date: 12 May 2012
Exhibition with publication:
Opening Date June 2013

During May 2012 I was commissioned to work on a series of mixed-media art pieces in response to the cultural transformation of the Oliva factory building in S. João Da Madeira, Portugal, into a large-scale arts centre the Oliva Arts Factory.

The presentation of the commission took place during a weeklong artist’s residency at the city’s Paços da Cultura which involved a series of arts workshops with local students. See http://olivarewind.wix.com/drawing

The finished series of sixty works will be exhibited as the inaugural exhibition of the Oliva Arts Factory with an accompanying publication in May 2013.

The Elevage de Poussière series takes its title from a historically significant artwork by the Surrealist photographer May Ray. The photograph is a close-up of a detail of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (one of the most innovative artworks of the 20th century) covered in a layer of accumulated dust.

From the outset I was presented with something of a quandary: how to research the industrial and cultural history of the S. João da Madeira area in general and the transformation of the Oliva Factory in particular, whilst at the same time being honest to the fact that I am an outsider?

Above all it has been the Portuguese cultural phenomenon of saudade that has formed the main focus of the project’s research, most particularly because of course we have no precise equivalent in English culture.

The photographs I had taken of the empty Oliva factory, a mere architectural shell, provided the catalysts for a series of distant reveries on the theme of a culture I felt intimately close to.
Research was developed into the history of found objects (with particular reference to Marcel Duchamp), collage (Robert Rauschenberg) and artworks that deliberately bear the traceries of human histories (Kurt Schwitters).

Thus the research combined visual and poetic reverie on the cultural/historical phenomena of saudade with extensive research into the industrial history and its transformation into contemporary cultural industries.