Paula Urbano, In the waiting Room of Desertion, 2014
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 and immediate way.
Abstract to article “Exegesis In the Waiting Room of Desertion” by Paula Urbano, published in PARSE Journal issue 10 Spring 2020. Editors: Erling Björgvinsson Nicholas De Genova Mahmoud Keshavarz Tintin Wulia.
Stills from: In the Waiting Room of Desertion, by Paula Urbano 8:52 min, 2014, colour, 16:9, HD.
In the Waiting Room of Desertion, can be seen in archive until May 20 2021.