Seila Fernández Arconada will be undertaking an artist placement at the project BioResilience Colombia during a 3 months period between the 2nd of May and the 28th of July in 2019. This is part of the BioResilience’s project cross-component integration (socio-cultural/palaeoecology/forest ecology) and outreach work through joint funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC0 and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Here is an introduction to her work.
Seila Fernández Arconada is an artist-researcher based in the UK. Her work focuses on exploring artistic methodology, its boundaries and new social approaches. She has wide experience engaging with artistic praxis on local communities, participatory and collaborative research methodologies involving academics, practitioners and community members. Her praxis deepens into socially engaged art practice which looks for meaningful relations across tangible boundaries by providing an artistic experience with the familiar; and so enhances sociological and environmental consciousness, and a number of skills and learning opportunities. Her research based praxis focuses on the actual process working on a situated practice giving importance to transversal dialogues with different kinds of knowledge. Therefore each different project involves a bespoke method to proceed with.
She has exhibited internationally, recently at “Antropologia, paisagem sentidos: pesquisa e arte da/na paisagem” (Museu da Terra de Miranda, Portugal), Imagined Landscapes (Royal West of England Academy, UK) Inbetween Storage (SERDE, Latvia), ‘Migration, Identity and Belonging’ (Institut Français, Mauritius) and Afluents (Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme at ACVic, Spain).
She has co-directed The Land of the Summer People, a collaborative project together with the Water Engineering Department at the University of Bristol. She co-directed the collaborative-socially engaged project with the artist Sage Brice and individuals affected by floods in Somerset (UK): Some:When, celebrating cohesion through the watery heritage of the Somerset Levels and Moors. In addition, she has delivered numerous cross-disciplinary workshops and interventions, recent examples include: Punto de Encuentro: Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro (Mexico), Communities Development in Post-Crisis Regions (Ukraine), Governing for Resilience in Vulnerable Places (Netherlands), Transnational Dialogues (China), On Earth, (UK) and Wonder, Wander (Spring Sessions, Jordan).
She has been awarded the European Alternatives funding and the Artists’ International Fund of the British Council and Arts Council England for 2014 and Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship 2017 (Ireland) among others.
She believes that a socially engaged, collaborative art practice has a unique contribution to make to social understandings of contemporary concerns. It represents, generates and translates meaning facilitating reflection and understanding. It operates as a forum enabling an open dialogue rather than limiting thinking, generating questions, dynamic relations and unfolding layers of coding, acting as the focus of dialogue and interaction.
For more information about her work: www.seilafernandezarconada.net
Examples of her work:
