Individual Residencies
2022 | Emma Willis
I am making future ruins,
Relics for a history that someone else will write.
The writer of this history will speak – if people still speak – about what they mean:
The ancient mythologies
The time of bodies
The time of time, and of bodies marked by time, marking time.
“Look, here is an arm
And there, outstretched fingers
Reaching for a future she will never know
And living a past we can only pretend to remember.”
While in residence, I worked on the creative elements of Imagination in Ruins/Love in a Dream, my response to the practices of architectural folly making from the Baroque period to the present. In intertwining materiality and whimsy, I’ve been taken by how such sites invite contemplation and a type of creative dreaming.
I am also interested in the texts that influenced them, including Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, and Henry Hawkin’s Parthenia Sacra. Binding these texts and sites are yearning, mourning, dreaming, a love of nature and art, and, ultimately, interior transformation. My project has explored these affects through both site visits and writing, ultimately working towards a digital artefact combining textual and audio-visual elements.