We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new residency in partnership with the fellowship program of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination of Columbia University. The II&I, based in Paris, is a unique program that fosters intellectual and artistic diversity unconstrained by medium and discipline through the interaction of the arts and academia. Each year the Institute brings together a cohort of 14 post-docs, artists and writers from around the world, to spend a year together in work and conversation. We selected interdisciplinary British writer, poet and artist Jay Bernard @cmmn_stance, whose work is rooted in social histories. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and is the winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge. Recent work includes My Name is My Own, a physical performance piece in response to June Jordan premiered at Southbank Centre’s Poetry International; Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise; Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation at the Serpentine pavilion; and Complicity, a pamphlet based on the collection at the Tate.
In Providenza, J. will work with music, research and poetry. “This new work will looks at how the promise of the post-war period played out and how it is being rapidly dismantled today. Starting with the decline of the British empire and the rise of new forms of coloniality, this project begins on the ground circa 1960, with emergent ideas of class, race, sex and gender via the consciousness raising group, the shop floor, the sound system, the prison, the campaign group, the student union, the night club, the social centre and the council estate. Set in a fictional part of South London, we hear from the people who lived under, within and between the narratives that shaped and changed British society.”
