Invitation for contributions to Elena Marchevska’s Study Room Guide on Displacement

As part of her LADA research residency exploring Live Art practices and methodologies in working with issues of displacement, the artist and researcher Elena Marchevska is inviting artists to think about the ‘state of displacement’ that we are experiencing globally and to share anecdotes, stories, short observations, poems, photographs or performance texts which will be collected and published as part of Elena’s forthcoming Study Room Guide on Displacement.

Please send your contributions to Elena.marcevska@gmail.com by Friday 20 January 2017

“Displacement /dɪsˈpleɪsm(ə)nt /

1. the action of moving something from its place or position.
2. /psychoanalysis/ the unconscious transfer of an intense emotion from one object to another.

The winter is here and it is cold outside, so why not take a moment, sit down and think about where you are right now? How did you get here? Where did you come from? What was your journey like? Was it long? Far? Did you come from somewhere remote, rural to this big and buzzing city? Would you consider yourself displaced? Were you willing or was it necessity? Force? And does this experience of displacement shape your art practise? How?

I’d also invite you to think about the state of displacement that we are experiencing globally right now. With the rise of populism in the Western world, the unconscious anger, pain and dissatisfaction of the voting electorate has been transferred to intense emotions against immigrants, women and people of colour. Our general sense of normality in most Western developed democratic countries has been displaced; our perception of what actions/words are allowed in the public sphere is being challenged. And I have already been through this once before, albeit when I was very young. I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, a country that underwent an extreme rupture in its history in the ‘90s; a sudden eruption of anger fuelled by hidden intergenerational pain. But now, after twenty years, with curiosity and trepidation, I have begun to ask how live art and performance practitioners feel; how they would describe this ‘sudden’ displacement of anger and dissatisfaction that we are experiencing in the UK, US and Europe. How do you feel?”

– Elena Marchevska, December 2016