Laura

Dover Residency

A side door entry, stairs whose material, height, width, and depth change while ascending, from stone to finished wood to simple planks, winding up to a hallway, two rooms on either side, at the end opening up to a generous space, divided on one side by columns. Light floods through opposite windows from northeast to southwest. A residency, an accommodation, is not only about what I do in the space, but what a space or a place does to me. The view from the windows is above the trees. The sea, expanding to the left, tugs at me. There is always something magical about it to me. An element that carries. It demands respect.

The duties of my residency are to present something and to be a host while being a guest. I have chosen to present a film programme, a requirement is that it be embedded in the workings of the place. So good and lucky to collaborate with a current ongoing project. The evening is couched in thoughts about gathering: congregating, collecting, shepherding. All these aspects of gathering are present during the screening and after through comments and conversations.

The space beyond the studio becomes a subject. It breathes its life all around me. I begin to casually record the wisps of being, while also, which is actually the reason why I am here, transcribing moments of memory that should, at some point, become a document, a relation of a story of the relation to the body, the mind, and the spirit. Thoughts about dignity and what a being is, an entity made up of working parts, invisible and visible during the lives we each hold dear.