Angelina’s residency at Bank Street is about collaboration between writing and writers and the wider artistic community. She will use popular ideas and discourse about ekphrasis as a starting point for exploration. Is writing in response to art inherently mimetic, or is there something more that can be achieved through a dialogue between text and art? How does ekphrastic writing affect notions of originality and authenticity? Can a poem written in response to an art object be considered a unique piece of art in its own right, or is it secondary, dependent on its source?
Angelina will be working with other resident artists at Bank Street to discover how ekphrasis can be moved beyond preconceived limitations, collaborating with people working in various media, including music, sculpture and photography, and attempting to combine ideas of performative writing with concepts of ekphrasis … can the act of writing become art, itself?
One strand of exploration will be to organize events at Bank Street, inviting writers to come in and respond to a range of artworks. The project will be opened up to these writers to see how they respond, whether they choose to work with one art object, or their overall sense of the space, whether they create a narrative focusing on an image, or the artistic process, whether they are driven by theme, or description.
To consider ideas of authenticity, these texts will be sent to a new set of artists, who will be asked to create an art object from the writing. How will these artworks compare to the first set of artworks? Do the texts provide a new and unique source for the artists, or do themes, images or concepts from those first artworks dominate the later works? How significant is it that these pieces create an identifiable chain, if that’s what they do? Can each piece of the chain stand alone?
The residency will evolve out of existing concepts of ekphrasis, with new ideas and modes of exploration coming out as the project develops. You can follow the progress of the residency here: http://angelinaayers.wordpress.com/
