The two weeks have been busy, Can Serrat Residency hosted
a day of experimentation at the El Bruc town hall, ran a day trip to Barcelona
for a gallery opening at one residency space and an open mic at another. A book
club was also organized, as well as multiple paella (paellas?) cooked.
I’ve also managed to make progress on three chapters
of the book, Tomas Brown, past Canberran and another of the residents here,
translated six of my poems into Spanish and I’ve managed to get feedback on my
work as well as provide input into Tomas’s writing project.
The experimentation day on my first weekend here involved
a past resident’s work, and building three concurrent narratives from images they
supplied while using simple scripts, then turning those into a film. The process took up the entire day
for selecting different images, then
arranging them. It was a bit hard to
follow for me so I am probably missing a bit, I’d only just arrived and was adjusting to the different languages being spoken.* But it was a fun
process to watch and I found a way to engage with it alongside some of the other
residents who were similarly on the fringe of the event. It was one of
those days that will percolate and maybe something creative will come out of
it, but even if it doesn’t it was useful to see all the visuals of past Can Serrat residents.
During last week all the residents of Can Serrat
travelled to Barcelona for a day and night of engaging with other residencies,
we first went to a gallery space and residency called La Place for a Q&A regarding the
installation there. Three hexagon tubes were suspended from the ceiling, you
could stand up into each of them and a sound would play while (it was explained
to us) a smell was released - I completely missed the smells. There was also an abundance of rock salt all
over the ground that made a very satisfying crunching sound as people walked on
it. The gallery doubles as the work-space while upstairs is were the resident lives. They are looking for people to apply to undertake residencies and
exhibitions, and sound installations are one of the things they are about.
The next stop in Barcelona was an open mic at the now
closed Jiwar Barcelona Residency. The open mic was a chance for all the current Can
Serrat residents to present some of their work, and we heard poetry from one of
the past Jiwar residents. My favourite part of the experience was hearing
poetry in Catalan, I’ve heard poetry in Spanish before, and in French, but to
hear a Catalan poet perform work he’d written about locations in Barcelona was a first for me;
the space was excellent too, we were in the back garden of the Jiwar Residency
surrounded by apartment buildings, so we had to finish by 8pm out of
consideration for the neighbours.
We had a book club this Tuesday gone too; all the
residents were asked to read a passage from what they were currently reading or
present something that had influenced them. I can’t check the book out of the
library here as I don’t have membership (I walk up to the library each day to read), so instead I read Ron Padgett’s The
Fortune Cookie Factory, it was the first poem by someone else that I performed and
it has stayed with me since I first read it in the Bible of American Outlaw Poetry.
We each provided context for our reading and the group then discussed it. This
discussion was pretty wandering and interesting as we explored some of the concepts
behind the different residents’ work, my favourite discussion centred on the
positives and negatives of deconstructing people’s beliefs (to way over summarize).
I will write a about where my project is at in part
two of this post, as well as how I’ve interacted with the work of some of the
other residents. Until then, here is a photograph of one of the permanent
residents, he was sick when I arrived, and so pretty stand-offish, but after a
dose of antibiotics he has become really talkative and keen to hang with us
temporary residents.
* When I was here in 2014 the majority of residents
were from English speaking countries, so it was pretty comfortable. This time
while everyone speaks English, the majority of people are from Spanish and
French speaking countries and it has taken a couple of days to adjust to
hearing those two languages so frequently.
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