{VEM academic-artist residency collaboration: Pablo de Orellana & Mariah Whelan}

Following on from last week’s post about the academic/artist collaborations Ive had the pleasure of capturing. Here’s some of the prep work by Dr Pablo De Orellana and poet Mariah Whelan.

Mariah and Pablo have been working on developing close analytical collaborations bringing together political science and poetry practice to study nationalism in the case of Brexit. Starting from everyday nationalist discourses found in the online realm, Mariah explored the very words, expressions and arguments that deliver to the public nationalist concepts such as the link between race and cultural belonging. Their joint method works as follows: having identified a number of key arguments, from race to behaviour and ethics, Mariah explored their public discourses through poetic means, retrieving their essential features and particularly their aesthetic construction. These were then analysed by Pablo using political analysis methods. The analysis revealed a fascinating and powerful side of nationalist Brexit discourses: their aesthetic constructions create a number of powerful and convincing shortcuts, for instance between the visibility of foreignness and the visibility of social problems, and most powerfully of all an otherwise impossible bridge between the visibility of foreign origin in the flesh and the ethical behaviour of foreigners.

words Pablo, images Ly, poetry Mariah.

Here is the finished gif from this piece of work c/o the artists.