Photoworks Interview
Corinne Silva recently showed new works in the exhibition NEW: DEFENCE open 28 April 2018 at Coalhouse Fort, East Tilbury.
Curated by Gemma Padley, the exhibition brought together nine artists relating to the theme of defence, either by creating work including the site itself or in response to the fort’s rich archive of objects, documents and photographs. Artists included Tom Brannigan, Victoria Coster, Felicity Hammond, Laurynas Karmalavicius, Dafna Talmor, Alastair Thain, Michael Whelan and Samuel Zealey, including your own works.
Photoworks: For anyone unfamiliar with your work, could you describe your practice and what informs your research?
Corinne Silva: I’m interested in what the human-shaped landscape, formed through architecture and gardens, can tell us about the condition of being alive in this moment as a human, animal or plant. And in surfaces, seamlines, cracks. While my background, training and sensibility are in photography, I bring in other elements, such as video, sound, objects, performance and, increasingly, collaboration. For the past few years I’ve been working on various research projects with other artists, writers, botanists, farmers and activists.
I’ve spent the past decade or so working around the Mediterranean. For Manifesta 8, I made Imported Landscapes – site specific billboard installations with photographs that relocate northern Moroccan landscapes into Murcia, Spain. This subtle intervention in the landscape emphasised the ongoing narrative of trade, colonisation and human and plant mobility between two countries and two continents across what is now a fiercely protected European border. More recently, Gardening the Suburbs and Wounded are two room installations using photography and sound that I have shown together as Garden Sate and published in a monograph of the same name. In this work I used different strategies to consider the human domination of landscape through the act of planting. The works focus on the tactics used by the Israeli State to rename, reshape, and control the Israeli/Palestinian landscape. In all of this I am thinking about photography, its historical role in the development of a dangerous European imaginary of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and how else it can be used, to set up new formations and relationships, to make cracks appear, to contribute to a space for alternative futures to be dreamed up.
Installation view, NEW: DEFENCE, Coalhouse Fort, East Tilbury, 2018
