15 Orbits Around The Sun
Artist Talk with Daniel & Clara
To Celebrate 15 Years of Collaboration
Saturday 29th November, 7-9pm
Firstsite, Colchester
Join us for a special event to celebrate 15 years of collaboration between artist Daniel & Clara. Through film, photography, performance and mail art, their expansive body of work explores the porous boundaries between inner worlds and the landscapes around us, weaving together observations of nature, memory, myth and the uncanny. In this in-depth talk, the artist will take us on a journey through their practice — a space where perception, nature and imagination collide.
The presentation will be followed by a conversation with Amanda Geitner, director of East Anglia Art Fund.
Within weeks of first meeting in 2010, Daniel & Clara began a collaboration that has grown into a singular body of work spanning film, performance, installation, photography and mail art. Their journey began with Savage Witches, a kaleidoscopic feature film about creative freedom and the possibilities of cinema as an art form.
From there they have gone on to create a vast and diverse output that has been screened and exhibited around the world, including Grand Palais, Paris; HKW, Berlin; By Art Matters, Hangzhou; Doclisboa, Lisbon; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; BFI Southbank; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Norwich Castle Museum.
In this talk, the artist will guide us through the evolution of their practice — from early experiments in film that explored the idea of cinema as a site of psychological transformation, to their recent explorations of landscape and weather that blur the boundaries between reality and dream.
Along the way we’ll hear about their formative years living in a dilapidated beach house in Portugal, a self-fashioned laboratory where their experimental methods and collaborative vision took shape; and how a two-week stay on Mersea Island during the COVID lockdown became a permanent relocation, grounding their work in the shifting atmospheres of the Essex coast.
They will also talk about the role of collaboration in their practice both as “two humans working as one artist” and within a wider community of creatives, from their participatory films through to peer groups and projects such as Film Panic magazine, and MIA, an organisation they established to support artists working with moving image.
What emerges is a story of artistic practice as a total way of life, a deep dedication to experimentation, creative freedom and collaboration.
