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Life hack: unemployed professors will do your homework — and interview
, By Marie Winckler, November 16th
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Gabija: Learning to Breathe in 2020 – A Digestion on Race and Habits
, By Gabija Mitchell, June 15th
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Lotte Andersen on “Fragments From The Esprit Family”
, By Lotte Andersen, Paige Silveria, June 8thTell me about your pandemic. You were stuck in Peru for a bit?
Lotte Anderson
My partner is Peruvian and we travelled over for a show he was working on at the end of February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. They shut the airport for most of that year for international travel and by November, after eight months there was a military coup in the country. It felt quite unsafe and we considered how artists have worked or ensured their practices survived political instability. At the time I read the Peggy Guggehien biography, where the biographer shared an anecdote about Juan Miro dressing as a cheese farmer with his work rolled up in a bag. We had a chat about what to do and decided to travel for a while until we could decide on a base. The first place we visited was Mexico.
PS
You’re in Mexico at the moment, how has it been?
LA
Spending time in Mexico has been invaluable but I am back in Lima at the moment. I love Mexico and the art scene in the capital, I find the pace and mood of the city incredibly accelerated and radical. I find it extremely exciting to meet artists like Leonel Salguero, Débora Delmar and Nico Colon, and working in the same city as designers like Sofia Elias. You hit up against a lot of different energy in a short space of time. I work mainly in my studio day to day with Juan and Alonso.
PS
What have you been working on since arriving?
LA
When we first arrived, we travelled around the coast of Oaxaca and I started making the Esprit family collage series. I worked in local printing and copy shops using an archive of images I gathered from my Dominican grandmother in 2017. Some are Carnival scenes and others are Sunday church services or family portraits. I was interested in the collective memories which are held in photographs of group scenes or domestic spaces, particularly those handed down from families who have emigrated. I feel the collages serve to reflect a more fragmented experience, through cuts or by recontextualizing them with other shapes. I am interested in the flattening which occurs when trying to historicize events. In this way, the camera can also flatten emotional dimensionality, and how the object can hold a weight that is psychophysical. Working on the photos I would recognize facial features and ritualistic activities linked to my experience of my close family who emigrated to Wales. It became a confusing thing, personally, I found myself confronted with my difference. You go through so many transmutations as people of dual ethnicity. I was interested in applying these thoughts and feelings to the collages and then into a video work. I extracted a group of screenshots from family footage, of an ordinary Sunday. The collages feature elements from relatives who remained in Dominica.
PS
It’s interesting, the sliding scale of integration and all of the layers within that. Your family’s heritage and then with the next generation, of you bringing your British values to Peru and Mexico as well.
LA
Yes. I began working on the video after the collages were completed. By that point I had been away from the UK for some time, and particularly my mother’s family. I’m interested in the politics of the room the video is filmed within. The dialogue veers in this mundane way, into a conversation about scaling class boundaries. I find the casualness and understanding that occurs between the characters quite interesting. The scene occurs in my grandparent’s house with my mum looking at ‘Loot’, in the real estate section, for a house for her pregnant sister. Now living in London, my uncle asks if my mother would ever move back to Cardiff. Her response is slightly defeated, “No, we’re Londoners now.” I find the tension in the dialogue quite poignant, the idea of constant forward motion, which to me is a very Black experience. There is this sense of the need to accelerate handing over lessons or experiences to her sibling. Growing up in the UK I found that conversations about class politics had dominated political rhetoric, without including intersections of race and no mention of colourism. In the work, I am trying to frame certain nuances about social mobility. I am interested in framing and sharing these nuances, speculating on collective ambition. I wonder about poc bodies moving around the global south and how receptive those countries are to the stories of diaspora blackness inhabiting their spaces. I think it is still too early to draw any conclusions as Covid has brought many new concerns to how we can exist.
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Unfinished Business (the Video) – Teaser
, By Cecile Winckler, Hanah Amber Young, Terence Connors, January 22nd
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