Claudia Pilsl is coming to Project Space Plus at the end of January, with an exciting and immersive exhibition!
Beginning of 2018 Claudia Pilsl undertook a 3 months residency at x-church in Gainsborough. Her proposition to the community was to explore the question What does it mean to be a resident?. For this she spent time with everybody who was willing to let her join in and become, if only temporary, part of their lives. The wish to understand better what it means to be a UK resident stemmed from her increasing anxiety about the status of EU citizens post Brexit. Having lived longer in England than in Austria, the country of her birth, the place she identifies with most is not a particular country but Europe as a whole. For her as a migrant and future EU guest-worker it is therefore not easy to define what means to be a resident within the borders of a nation state.
The main piece in the exhibition is a video (1h 44min) in which the artist merges footage from a long drive in a white van around Gainsborough and an audio track edited from over 15 hours of recorded interviews during her residency. These conversations center on what it means to be a resident, how it is to live in his area, what the future could hold for this small market town.