Paula Urbano

I wrote an article in PARSE journal issue 10 on Art and Migration.

The title of the article is Exegesis In The Waiting Room of Desertion.

Abstract:

As an artist investigating existential uncertainty, Paula Urbano turns her focus to a refugee seeking asylum in Sweden today. Being a child of political refugees herself, Urbano wants to explore what it would be like to arrive as a refugee today, resulting in a series of works titled Proportions of Waiting (2015). In the video In the waiting Room of Desertion Urbano uses her own body and voice to enact extracts from the play Psychosis 4:48 (1999) by the British playwright Sarah Kane. The play articulates a raw and unmediated voice of despair, hopelessness and frustration. By using extracts from the play, adapted and spoken by the artist, she speaks of the experience of an asylum seeker that she follows over the course of one year. Rather than de-individualising or distancing the audience from the specific experience, Urbano creates a form of double othering and brings it into being and into material form in a direct way. Urbano’s narrative style is clearly outlined in this exegesis on the video In the Waiting Room of Desertion, as well as how it relates to the 45-minute film The Refugee of the Sorrowful Figure and this series of work of art came about.

Read the article: