Made during the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg; class of Thalia Hoffman and Manar Zuabi.

The name of the course "Displaced Artists On Their Way Home”, suggests that we should be looking for a way back home. Even if it is an imaginary home, an idea of a place. It implies a return, a retracing of steps. A forced migration or exile, when we believed we had a place.

But what if home is no longer a fixed point on a map, but instead something we carry with us and reconstruct through our practices?

What was left behind?
What brought us all here?
How do we position ourselves facing disasters?
How to be an artist in this reality?
And what are the answers we are looking for?
Is it art a safe space where we can all coexist?

The body knows what to do. In this room, we have all developed art tactics to find our places, away from home. This demands new lexicons, as if we need a new vocabulary to face this world. All these artists have each developed their own poetics of displacement, transforming absence into methodology, finding their way through cracks and loopholes.

Text by Sylvia Monasteros