Transmuted Stories 2015

Transmuted Stories is a project realised during a one-month residency at Nomadic Village. Over the first 10 days, the residency took place in Nomadic Village, in Cerkno, Slovenia. Afterwards, we travelled with the Galleria Nowhere through Croatia, Serbia, and I finished the residency in Romania.

Project 1 – the blog

During the residency, I carried out 2 projects. The first one was a blog at www.transmutedstories.blogspot.co.uk This project started as some sort of travel-log that instead of narrating on-road adventures, would focus on harvesting memories from people that we met along the road. Then it mutated into this semi-fictional realm for Chinese whispers, more than anything, as an attempt to emphasise the relativity of memory and truth. Fiction does not have to be fantastic or unreal. I am not going for award-winning storytelling either. I am simply recounting normal everyday stories. Sometimes I spice them up, sometimes I shorten them and make them a little more mundane. The relevance of this project has to do with evidencing the frailty, or in my personal opinion, the non-existence of truth, thereby evidencing the potential for the creation -as opposed to absorption or transmission- of memory.

Project 2 – the suitcase

The suitcases were given to us by Klaus and Tina -the artists organisers of Nomadic Village- to react to or use within our works. I used the suitcase as the container for my notes, where the ‘real’ stories are.

Whenever I talked with people for the blog, I normally gave them a plastic crane in return for the stories. The suitcase became a sculptural object which contained the stories and the cranes, mostly wanting to burst out.

Project 3 – The postcard-collages

I made a postcard sized collage in every stop. If we just spent the night, the collage of that place got added to the work in the Galeria Nowhere. However, in places where we showed the exhibition, I left or forgot the postcard made from the last exhibition site. This way, the postcard from Cerkno was left in Metelkova, the one from Metelkova was left in Sombor and Sombor was left in Subotica.