Migration, Identity and Rurality, with writer Dr. Davina Quinlivan and film maker Antonina Szram

This intimate residency has only 5 spaces available. This means you will have time and space for more meaningful engagement with Davina and Antonina, and with the residency themes. Laura and Caroline (A Sometimes Project), will be joining you. We will be thinking about the ship carrying Joanna of Aragon who was rushing back to Spain to claim the throne of Castile when their fleet were wrecked in the area. The wreck is totally submerged, but is now a seagrass bed which is a nursery for sea horses. Davina plans to explore the idea of Joanna’s voice and sounds connected to the living world through text and image. We will explore the idea of the river as a space of ‘phantasy’ and haunted archive. Climate, colonialism and migratory presences will be explored through free association, automatic handwriting experiments and we may even create a tarot deck based on the stories we encounter (via archives and a walking tour of the site). Beyond Joanna’s story, I will build on my own body of work which focuses on radical concepts of embodiment, nature, mythology, ancestral knowledge, class and identity. If we try to ‘resurrect’ Joanna, what is brought to the surface and why would her story matter to us now? What can we learn and where do we both belong now as inhabitants of Devon? How do our stories intersect and why? Antonina’s workshop will encourage participants to experiment with speculative responses to layered narratives where the site, the estuary and shoreline, are protagonists. We will explore creative ways of honouring the cultural threads from many places that weave people, stories and histories together. Boundaries and bodies, porous and shifting like a tide, are not made of straight lines or hard edges. As Da Cunha, D. & Mathur, A. point out, in The Invention of Rivers (2018): ‘The line by which representations assert the land-water divide is drawn in a time when water appears containable and not when it is precipitating, evaporating, transpiring, and generally behaving in ways that defy delineation’. What if we thought about bodies, migrations and identities in this way? Participants will engage in a range of performative acts, exploring thresholds which signify borders, especially where the river meets the sea.