Cornish Weekender Programme and Guest Artists
View from Porthmeor Studios
UKYA is super excited to be travelling to St Ives this weekend for The Cornish Weekender - the second of a suite of micro residencies run in partnership with artist spaces across the UK. Working with Porthmeor Studios, the oldest studio complex in the country, UKYA has selected 11 outstanding artists to participate in three days of creative exploration and interdisciplinary collaboration.
The residency programme has been developed by acclaimed international Curator, Claudio Zecchi, whose research is focused on investigating the relationship between art and public space. Since 2014 he has been conducting Practices as an Intersection in a Fragile Environment , a travelling debate platform aimed at understanding, in a state of cultural nomadism, new visions and readings of the public sphere analyzing the reciprocal relationship between practices - artistic, curatorial and institutional -, the territory and local communities.
Most recently, Zecchi has been residing in Japan for a few weeks, at the TOKAS - Tokyo Arts and Space , to develop the fifth chapter of this research.
The delivery of the residency is supported by artists, Chiara Dellerba and Andy Harper. Andy Harper is an international exhibiting artist; Senior Lecturer on the MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths, London; and a studio holder at Porthmeor Studios. On the first day of the residency, Andy will work with the artists, leading them on an exploration of St Ives and initiating a group understanding of each other's practice. Following this, the group will attend Late at Tate at Tate St Ives.
Day two will be led by Claudio Zecchi, who invites the artists to undertake a 'blind walk'. In pairs, with one person completely blindfolded, artists will explore the town, endeavouring to reach a destination and undertaking some sensory interventions along the way.
In the evening of Saturday 14 April, UKYA and Porthmeor Studios invite members of the community in St Ives to come to the studios to share experiences (and pizza!) with the artists.
Chiara Dellerba will work with the artists on day three of the residency. Dellerba is a visual artist. Her practice consists of researching and experimenting different situation where she shares and rediscovers with other people: personal memories, traditions, rituals and cultures to address questions about radical aesthetics, self sufficiency, the magic relation human- Nature, the politics of food (production methods and sharing experiences), personal and public manifesto and its value in the contemporary society.
Chiara's workshop, Here is always somewhere else, centres around the mysterious disappearance of the fishermen. Artists will recreate a geographical and historical Utopian narrative of fishermen community, recently disappeared in the sea. They will be asked to reconstruct what happened to them, generating ideas on possible and impossible scenarios, truths, possibilities and community failures.
The residency will be rounded off with a screening of the film, Ogni Opera di Confessione by Alberto Gemmi and Mirco Marmiroli.
Stay tuned to our social media channels for updates over the weekend.